Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet (8 page)

He looked at me like I was stark raving mad. “Whatever for?”

“I don’t know …” I said, sheepishly. “Science or something?”

He gave a savage laugh.

“Once I deliver the beast dead,” Salisbury said, “the scientists can study it to their hearts’ content.”

“You’re just going to kill it?”

“And then empty my bladder on its stinking carcass.”

He strode towards me. “Let’s get something clear right now, Mr. Levine. I’m not here to capture or chronicle this creature. I’m here to return it to hell where it belongs.”

“What about Ned?” Eliza said.

“And perhaps to get your friend back alive,” Salisbury added as an afterthought.

“Now,” he continued, “any man or woman who has a problem with that ought to say so now—”

Lester raised his hand. “Yeah, I wanna go home.”

“Because once we’re out there on its trail,” Salisbury went on, “once the hunt is joined, there’s no turning back—”

Lester said, “If you could just drop me off at The Henhouse—” “Your lives will depend on you doing exactly what I say when I say it—” “Why’s no one listening to me?” Lester whined. Salisbury fixed his gaze upon me. “Are we clear?” I nodded. He grinned. “Then let’s go bag this bastard.”

Now I’m no skunk aper, but I’ve hunted before, mostly squirrel, and it wasn’t long before I began to question Salisbury’s methods, and wonder what the hell we’d gotten into here.

Salisbury was manning the lawn chair fitted to the camper’s roof. His feet were propped on the loudspeaker. The stock of the elephant gun was nestled against his crotch, the barrels jutting up from between his thighs like a magnificent steel phallus. Scanning the woods through binoculars, gnawing a stick of beef jerky to maintain his energy levels, Salisbury barked directions over the engine noise.

Eliza was driving the camper. At Salisbury’s command, she’d press a button on the dashboard console to activate the loudspeaker, and a godawful honking yowl would echo over the woods. It sounded like Ric Flair being sodomized by a moose with its pecker greased in pepper spray. Salisbury claimed it was a close approximation of a skunk ape’s mating call—or at least, the best impression he could do. And who were we to argue with him? He was the expert.

Lester had by now passed out drunk. I might’ve been grateful for the brief respite from his endless whining, except that left me alone on bait detail.

The camper’s rear window was raised, and I was pouring out slop from the bait buckets, gagging at the foul stench despite the bandana covering my nose and mouth. A rancid stream of rust-colored slurry glistened in the wake of the Minnie Winnie. So far the stench had failed to attract the skunk ape, and if there was a skunk ape out here, it seemed impossible he could have missed it; what it
had
attracted was a biblical swarm of flies, trailing the camper like gulls behind a fishing trawler.

It was at times like this that I wondered what my old friend Boar Hog Brannon was up to nowadays. After he whipped me, I’d followed his progress in the boxing journals. I might have felt better about the loss if he’d gone on to have a long and illustrious career, retiring undefeated as light heavyweight champion of the world. But after steamrollering me, Boar Hog made only a brief appearance in the top twenty ranks, losing a wide points decision to Chick Estevez, before he vanished into obscurity. Still, a guy like Boar Hog always landed sunny side up. I imagined he probably owned a successful restaurant or car dealership. He lived in a nice big house, had a wife with nice big jugs, and sired a litter of husky piglets. Wherever Boar Hog was now, I felt confident he wasn’t slopping out buckets of shit that smelled worse than the River Styx.

I was prising the lid off another bait bucket when the camper hit a bump on the trail. Sludge spewed from the bucket, slopped over my boots.

“Damn it, Eliza!” I kicked the shit off my boots. “Watch where you’re going!”

“Sorry, Mr. Levine.” She gave me a sheepish smile in the rearview.

With an angry glance at Lester, I considered waking him, letting him take his turn on bait detail. He was sprawled across the kitchenette’s bench seat, snoring like a bear gone down for winter. “Mind if I ask you something?” I said to Eliza. “What exactly do you see in this clown?”

She gazed adoringly at Lester. “Oh, you don’t know him, Mr. Levine. No one knows Lester like I do. He’s my knight in shining armor.”

As if on cue, Lester scratched his nuts, cut a long fart like a sheet being torn in half, rolled over on the bench seat, and then continued to snore.

A chivalrous knight?
I couldn’t see it myself.

“Lester rescued me from the mongoloid hospital,” Eliza explained.

“Oh …” I managed to say.

I wondered if Walt knew about this. There had to be a law against hiring mongoloids as strippers, and if there wasn’t, there ought to have been.

Reading my expression, she giggled. “I wasn’t a patient, silly! I was a comfort nurse.”

“You’ve got a nursing license? Then what the hell are you stripping for?”

“Comfort nurses don’t need a nursing license.”

“Comfort nurse … That’s like, a hospice worker or something?”

“Oh no,” she chortled, “nothing like that. Nope, I was jacking off the mongoloids.”

“Come again?”

The bait fumes must have been making me heady, because it sounded like she’d said—

“Remember Melvin Stott?” Eliza went on. “When he escaped from the mongoloid hospital? They found him out at Planter’s hog farm?”

I remembered, alright. The kid had butt-fucked five hogs before the squealing woke Herb, he went outside to investigate, discovered Melvin balls-deep in Bessie, his prize sow, and put him to sleep with the stock of his scattergun. Herb never recovered from what he witnessed that night, sold his hog farm and took to the bottle, drinking himself to death under the bridge on old Highway 9.

“After Melvin Stott,” Eliza said, “the hospital chiefs put measures in place to ensure nothing like that ever happened again. They hired me on as a comfort nurse to take the steam off them boys.” She rolled her shoulder, as if her arm had stiffened at the memory of the labor. “And I’m happy to report that we never lost another one.” She raised her chin proudly. “Not on my watch.”

Jesus H. Christ
… First dopey Ned in his baboon costume, now card-carrying mongoloids. And
this
was the girl I’d figured was out of my league.

She must’ve seen the way I was looking at her because she said, “A mongoloid’s got needs just the same as any other man, Mr. Levine. And it really wasn’t as bad as you think. We just strapped ‘em down to their cots. Double restraints. Cuz that retard strength, it ain’t no myth. Then I pulled on the rubber glove and had at it. And not to toot my own horn, but I got real good at it too. I could finish ‘em off in just a few short strokes. Shoot, sometimes they’d pop their cork as soon as they saw me pulling on the glove. The doc said it reminded him of Pavlova’s dog. Said he might like to write a paper on it someday. Anyway, when I finished ‘em off, they were calm as little lambs, all sweet and subdued and good as gold.”

I shook my head. “I can’t believe the hospital has a practice like this …” I also couldn’t believe Eliza made being strapped down in the mongoloid ward sound like an appealing proposition.

She rolled her eyes at me. “They don’t exactly advertise the fact. Well, apart from the want-ad I saw in the
Bugle
. And the want-ad was kinda vague about what the job actually entailed. Like a cryptic crossword clue …

“Anyway,” she said, “Lester was working at the hospital as an orderly—”

“Lester Swash was gainfully employed?”

I found that harder to believe than the skunk ape.

She gave a knowing smile. “He didn’t last long,” she admitted. “But before they canned him, Lester would keep me company while I worked.”

I’ll bet he did, I thought; he probably regretted not having his video camera handy to film Eliza hard at work.

“Lester said I had talent and I should set my sights higher.”

“And that’d be dancing at The Henhouse?”

Eliza nodded happily. “Lester lined up the interview with Walt, and the rest is history … Now here I am on the verge of making my mark in a real honest to goodness dirty movie. And who knows where that’ll lead?”

I thought I had an idea.

“I know you and Walt don’t approve, Mr. Levine—but sometimes I gotta pinch myself just to be sure I ain’t dreaming. Cuz from where I’m from …” A flicker of darkness clouded her pretty face: “Believe me, I’ve already overachieved.”

If jacking off mongoloids was a step up in the world, I shuddered to think about her family history. On a brighter note, if it turned out Eliza really
was
Walt’s lovechild, she was giving me plenty of ammunition to bust his chops.

“Well,” I said, not knowing what else to say, “I hope it all works out for you.”

She dazzled me with a smile. “Oh, it will, Mr. Levine. You just wait n’ see.”

Salisbury thumped the butt of his gun on the roof of the camper, startling us.

“That’s enough jawing!” he roared.

Eliza rolled her eyes at me.

“Missy,” Salisbury said. “Give that bullhorn another blast!”

She muttered
Aye-aye, sir
and activated the loudspeaker.

“Levine!”

No longer ‘Mr. Levine,’ I noted.

“Keep running that bait line!”

I didn’t know which was worse, the stench of the bait, or the skunk ape’s mating call. Then I prised the lid from another bucket and decided it was definitely the bait.

We camped for the night in a rough dirt clearing, choked with brush and corralled by looming pines that creaked arthritically in the breeze.

There wasn’t room in the camper for us all to bed inside; given the stench of the bait buckets, nor would we have wanted to. I managed to convince Salisbury to leave the Minnie Winnie outside the clearing and upwind of our camp.

After slopping out bait all day, I looked and reeked like I’d gone skinny-dipping in a cesspool. Ducking behind the camper for privacy, I hooked a hose to the water tank, stripped down to my undershorts and hosed myself down. Why I felt the need to protect Eliza’s modesty, I do not know. Given everything she’d told me, the sight of me in my drawers was unlikely to trouble her, though maybe I was flattering myself.

As clean as I was ever going to get, I fetched a change of clothes from my bag and rejoined the others. Lester had gathered some wood, built a campfire, and commandeered the coziest spot in front of it. Eliza was cooking a pot of beans over the flames. “Where’s Salisbury?” I asked them.

“Went off to lay down some traps,” Eliza said.

I considered seeing if Salisbury needed help—thought,
Fuck it
—plopped myself in front of the fire with a tired groan, and watched Eliza as she stirred the beans. The stench of the bait was still fresh in my mind, not to mention my nose, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever eat again, but one whiff of the beans and I was surprised to hear my stomach growl. While I waited, I picked a twig off the ground and used it to scrape away the bait caked beneath my fingernails, and then incinerated the twig in the fire.

Having laid his traps around camp, Salisbury returned from the woods in time for supper. He seated himself Indian-style in front of the fire. Eliza doled out the beans and we ate in silence, watching the flames of the campfire dance. We did our
Blazing Saddles
impressions, and then Lester shared out cans from his crate of Keystone. Only Salisbury refused one, with a fussy shake of his hand. I recalled what he’d said to Walt about not drinking alcohol. Imbibing, as he’d called it. A skunk aper needed his wits about him. I had no such scruples.

Lester raised his beer can in a toast.

“To Ned,” he said in a choked voice, tears welling in his eyes.

I regurgitated the last mouthful of lukewarm beer back into the can, raised it in a toast, spluttered “To Ned,” and then gutted down the same mouthful.

“You think he’s still alive?” Lester asked Salisbury.

“I hope so, son,” the skunk aper said. “I hope so …”

But his eyes told a different story.

Before the atmosphere turned grim, Lester drained his beer can, fished a harmonica from his pocket, and began blowing a brave attempt at a tune. I expected Salisbury to object—Lester’s harp sounded little better than Salisbury’s recorded skunk ape calls—but he didn’t. Maybe he thought it might attract the skunk ape?

As Lester blew his harp, Eliza snuggled up next to him and rested her head on his shoulder. For a moment, they looked almost sweet sitting there, and I wondered why the hell I was still living alone. When I finally recognized the tune Lester was murdering, I broke into a grin. Clearing my throat, I started to sing along—badly—but my singing was no worse than Lester’s playing.

A-hunting we will go, a-hunting we will go

Heigh-ho, the derry-o, a-hunting we will go

Lester winked at me over his harp and kept playing. Eliza joined me for the chorus. I suspected Salisbury wanted to join in too—a tight smile peeked through the bristles of his beard—but he had his reputation to uphold.

Lester finished playing and took a little bow as Eliza applauded.

Maybe Lester wasn’t such an asshole after all? I thought. Then I remembered why I was there and decided the beer must have gone to my head.

Looking pleased with himself, Lester put away his harmonica, cracked open another beer, took a slurp, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and then blurted out to Salisbury with a drunk’s childlike tactlessness: “So how’d you get your scar, Jimmy?”

Eliza slapped his arm. “Lester!”

“What?” he said.

Salisbury looked like he couldn’t decide if he was offended more by the question or that Lester had called him ‘Jimmy.’

But now that Lester had pointed it out, none of us could help sneaking peeks at the vicious scar bisecting Salisbury’s beard, and he felt obliged to tell us the story.

“I was in the wilds of North Carolina,” Salisbury said, “tracking a skunk ape to what I believed was its lair in the ruins of an old civil war fort. There, much to my surprise, I encountered not a skunk ape, but one very ornery cougar. The thing about skunk apes, they’re crafty devils—and they
are
devils, make no mistake about that. In retrospect, I’m convinced the skunk ape knew I was hot on its heels and deliberately lured me into the lion’s, or rather the cougar’s den.