PIGGS - A Novel with Bonus Screenplay (18 page)

"Now."

"What?"

"Get in the fucking car, no you can't take the Cad.
 
Get in the car, take care of it now."

"It's the middle of the night," Cat said.

"How the fuck do you know?
 
You can't tell time, how you know it's the middle of the night?"

"We'll get right on it," Grape said.

"I appreciate that."

"You going to call Mr. Ambrose, you still thinkin' on that?"

Cecil didn't answer.
 
He slammed the door in Grape's face.

Jack heard the pair move back down the stairs, a great deal slower than when they'd come up.

Cecil opened the fridge, shut it up again. Sat down, turned up the TV.
 
It was still Ben Hur.
 
With all the commercials, that was a real long show.

Jack climbed down, got to the floor before the numb went out, didn't care about the pain, he was too full of anger to care if he broke a leg.

Son of a bitch, fucking Cecil Dupree!
 
He wasn't happy embarrassing people, making them crawl buck naked with an underage singer on their back.
 
Now he had to kill Ricky Chavez, take that away from Jack too.

That's the way people were, the way they'd always been, as long as Jack could recall.
 
You want something, someone else wants it too.
 
They get there first, there's nothing left for you.

"Well fuck you, Cecil," Jack said aloud.
 
"I hope you miss the end of Ben Hur, I hope you choke on your fucking Dr Pepper too..."

J
ack woke with scratchy eyes.
 
Bloodshot, gritty eyes, glued up tight.
 
Eyes stuck solid with some kind of shit your body made just for that effect.

Why? Jack wondered.
 
Why would it want to do that?
 
Your body made lots of other yuck.
 
Little white things at the corner of your mouth.
 
Snot for your nose, wax for your ears.

Snot was okay if you were six.
 
It wasn't any fun after that.

Wax was okay, it could help you pass the time.
 
You could bend a paper clip, stick it in your ear.
 
See how much you got.
 
Sometimes you got a little, sometimes you got a lot.
 
Guys in the joint would bet on wax.
 
Not the same guys who bet on Ben Hur.
 
This was a different bunch of guys.

Jack rubbed the crust out, sat up and looked around.
 
Ahmed sprawled on bags of rice across the storage room.
 
Ahmed was asleep or maybe not.
 
It was hard to tell if you didn't close your eyes.
 
Where he came from, Ahmed said, you keep your eyes open all the time.

Jack hoped the raghead was dozing now. It was almost light, and Jack knew he'd only had half an hour's sleep.
 
If Ahmed had seen him come in, he'd ask where he'd been all night.
 
Jack would make something up and he wasn't good at that. Everyone he knew could lie like a dog, but it didn't work for him. One look and you knew.
 
This was not a good trait for someone of the outlaw persuasion, but there was nothing Jack could do.

A
hmed didn't ask.
 
Rhino did.
 
Rhino walked in with a chicken from the fridge.
 
First thing he said was, "What the fuck you up to, Jack, you was out all night."

"Woo-woo," Ahmed said, and shot Jack a nasty wink, "I t'ink Jhack, he is getting heem a little, this is what I t'ink."

"Anybody asking you, Ary-fat?"
 
Rhino peered around the kitchen with his ball-bearing eyes.
 
"Anyone ask this sand nigger something, I didn't hear?"

Rhino split the chicken down the middle. Jack twitched as the cleaver dug wood.
 
Ahmed was good with a cleaver, but Rhino had arms as big as Ahmed's waist.

Ahmed found something to stir.
 
Ortega found a broom and swept his way out the back door.

"I couldn't sleep," Jack said.
 
"I walked around a while."

"Uhuh.
 
An' where'd that be?"

"Nowhere.
 
Walking is all."

"All night.
 
Walking somewhere."

"No sir, not all the time.
 
Sometimes, sometimes I sat down a while."

"Not all the time.
 
Sometimes, you was sitting for a while.
 
Sometimes–"

"Rhino, that's what I said, I was walking, that's all, I was just–"

In the dread, awful silence, Jack could hear a fly fart on the screen door, hear the paint peeling off the wall.

Rhino looked at Jack.
 
Looked at his hands.
 
Wiped chicken on his apron, looked at Jack again.

"That was a shameful thing to do, what Cecil did. Isn't no
 
way to treat a white man, don't care what he done.
 
What the fuck you looking at, Sodum Hoo-sayn?
 
All you mothers get moving back here, I got a Chink restaurant to run..."

J
ack thought he ought to feel bad, but he felt a lot better than he had in some time. You lose a little sleep, you can do without that.
 
But it wasn't every day you could hear Rhino say something bad about Cecil R. Dupree.
 
That was something else, and letting you smart off a little, too.

"I am glahd I live to see these t'ing," Ahmed said.
 
"Dhis is like you standin' in the strit, a comit is falling, the comit don' hit you, hit ever'body else.
 
It is like you peekin' in the window, there is a naked movie stahr. There is Jhulias Robers, she got no close on at all.
 
Both of these t'ing, you never be t'inkin' they goin' to hoppen to you."

"I don't want to talk about this," Jack said.
 
"I don't want to discuss it, so just get it out your head."

"Hey, I don' blame you for thees.
 
I am jus' saying, mahn–"

"Yeah, well don't.
 
Don't say nothing, that's all I want to hear about that."

"If I was you," Ortega said, "I'd put the incident out of my head, and never look at it again."

Ortega's eyes were slightly out of whack.
 
He'd seen Jack's encounter with Rhino the day before as a miraculous event, and had not expected to see it again.
 
He had gone to his car and downed a half pint of
El Escorpion
, a brand of mescal so bad it was scorned by vagrants on the street.

"Dhot is no makin' any sense," Ahmed said.
 
"Once a t'ing is being in you haid, it is stickin' in dere, man, is not comin' out again."

"This is what the Ay-rab people are thinking," Ortega said.
 
"The Ay-rab and the Jew.
 
No one else is thinking that."

"Ha!
 
A Mescan, he is tellin' me this?
 
I am listen to a Mescan who is drinkin' cactus piss?
 
I am not be listen to this."

"An ay-rab is the flea on the dick of the dog.
 
You insult country, you don't even have the good sense to eat a pig."

"Pig is for the Satan's people to eats.
 
God is tellin' you that.
 
You don' know, you don' know thees?"

Jack didn't hear any more, he was out of the kitchen, out the back door and down the street, the fire inside him heating up again, the pipes pumping battery acid so fast he could scarcely stay on his feet.

He clutched at his gut, the agony pulling at his features, soaking him with sweat.
 
Shit, it hadn't been that bad since–what?
 
Not even the horsie business had hit him like this.
 
It was those two gabbing, is what it was.
 
The whole country was full of assholes from foreign lands.
 
What were they doing here, why didn't they go the fuck away?

Jack walked out past Wan's and sat beneath the big live oak where Ortega parked his car.
 
It wasn't even eight or nine, but the sun was hot enough to start the insects buzzing in the trees.

He knew it wasn't Ahmed or Ortega or Rhino either that had
 
set his belly on a spree.
 
What it was, was what you call your relayed reaction, which meant your emotions and shit were catching up with your bodily parts and giving 'em hell.

He had tried to shove all that aside, what happened, what he'd done.
 
It had scared him so much he could hardly believe it was him that had done it at all.

Ahmed didn't know it, but was dead right about that.
 
Once you had stuff in your head, wasn't any way to shove it out again.

It had happened, and it wouldn't go away.
 
Just like all the other crap he'd done in his life:
 
You can't take anything back.
 
It's always there, whether you like it or not.

H
e got through the morning, doing all the things he'd put off the week before.
 
When he had to go in the kitchen, Ahmed and Ortega pretended he wasn't there.
 
Rhino was out front yelling at the guy from Tex Savallo's, who'd brought the wrong meat the second time this week.

Wan's never opened 'til five, and there wasn't any crowd at Piggs.
 
Only two dancers were on, Laura Lick and Whoopie LaCrane.
 
Both of them shuffled around the stage like the girls in Naked Zombie Wives, which Ahmed had rented six or eight times.

Cecil was nowhere in sight, and neither was Grape or Cat.
 
In a way, Jack was grateful for that, but it was sort of like waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it didn't help the fire in his gut.

Y
ou never know when something's going to happen, when you're going to know something you didn't know before, when it's going to pop right into your head.

Which is why Jack was so startled when it happened, he almost dropped a case of Shiner Beer.
 
It hit him right there, out of nowhere at all.
 
He knew, at once, exactly what the money in Cecil's stash was for, and couldn't imagine why he hadn't seen it clearly before.

The thought brought such a happy grin, he was glad nobody was around.
 
It wasn't an ordinary stash up there, it was money put aside, money for the dope buy from Ambrose Junior, and that meant Jack would be a whole lot richer when he stole it, richer than he'd dreamed about before...

J
ack had a box he kept in the corner, back behind the ten-gallon drums of Lotus Dream Soy from Wichita, Kansas, and the Shanghai Noodles from Maine.
 
There was very little in the box except Tylenol and Xanax and Pepcid-AC and wintergreen Tums, and half a dozen other remedies he'd tried.
 
None of them stopped the rage in his belly, even if you took the whole bunch at one time.

There was a pretty nice tie some dude had left at Wan's.
 
A letter, he'd found in the street, from someone in France.
 
Jack couldn't read it, but with the letter was a photo of a middle-aged guy in nothing but a Panama hat, so Jack guessed what the letter was about.

There were two other things in the box, paperbacks he'd found in the Greyhound station in Ada, Oklahoma.
 
Jack had never read either one, but he was certain the books, found together like that, held some meaning he was meant to understand.

He took all the Pepcid-AC and the Tums and the rest of the Tylenol, and went to the kitchen, where Ahmed had orders waiting for Piggs.
 
Recyled egg rolls, and buffalo wings with the Chef's Special Sauce.
 
Ahmed put certain desert powders in the sauce he said would sterilize the Caucasian race.
 
As soon as everyone in America ate at Wan's, that would be the end of that.

J
ack's gut had been hurting all day, hurting all the night before.
 
Now that darkness was on him again, primal magma spewed from the earth, churned, burned and boiled at such a fierce and awesome heat, it was all Jack could to keep from dropping everything, writhing on the ground.

He was frightened, scared out of his wits.
 
The thing he'd set in motion now filled him with dread.
 
Some other Jack must have done it, not him–some Jack who'd lost his fucking mind.