Bill ran a hand over his face, was amazed to feel what the mosquitoes had done. His skin felt like some kind of craft project that involved glue, stones, dried peas, and seashells. He wobbled to his feet, walked around, found a dead calf lying in the middle of the saw grass. The little dude was covered in mud, mosquitoes, worms, ants, and flies. Bill wondered about the worms and ants. How the hell did they get on these islands? Were they like him? Fuck-ups who had ended up here with no place to go and nothing to eat but a stupid calf that had crawled through a fence after greener grass, wandered off into the swamp and died.
Now that he thought about it, he decided he wasn’t like the ants or worms at all. He was more like the calf. He had struck out for greener pastures and ended up with a faceful of bug needles and an intense dose of the raw ass. And the water hadn’t done his shoes any favors either. He reached down, got hold of one of the soles, discovered it was coming loose. His feet felt awful in his shoes. Squishy, lumpy, and damned uncomfortable.
Bill studied the calf, and for a moment envied the insects. Even that rotting meat looked good. He felt weak and hungry and just plain mad. He didn’t have so much as a stick of gum to chew. He found himself watering up thinking of those cans of beets back at the house.
Shit, it wasn’t supposed to come out this way. His mother had been right. He was stupid. She said that’s why she was giving everything she owned to the cat livers, because a liver might be fixed, and he surely couldn’t.
Bill let out his breath and felt sorry for himself. He’d had a batch of money in his hands and he lost it in the car. The firecrackers too. He had panicked. He hadn’t even thought to grab the money on the way out of the car. The heist was at the bottom of the swamp somewhere. Monopoly money for some gator.
The mosquitoes were so fierce Bill found himself forced off the island and into the swamp water. It was deep on the other side, but he decided to go that way for no other reason than he didn’t want to go backwards.
The deputy had most likely called reinforcements by now, or perhaps he was still wandering madly about in the bottoms, waving his shotgun and firing his pistols, frightening the wildlife and calling everything he saw a cocksucker.
Bill waded and tried to figure his odds. He decided they might not be too bad. Maybe someone across the way had seen the car, but that didn’t mean they had recognized him. Even if they found Fat Boy’s body, which they would, and found Chaplin at the bottom of the swamp with a Roman candle in his head, it didn’t mean he was implicated. If he could get out of the swamp and make it back to his place, perhaps he could lay low and the whole thing would slide by. There might be suspicions, but that wasn’t the same as facts. Maybe if he used his head he could get to the car Fat Boy had planted. But no, that wouldn’t be smart. That belonged to Fat Boy, and he wanted to stay away from anything like that. He tried to remember if there was anything of his in Fat Boy’s hidden car, but he couldn’t think of a thing except a Baby Ruth wrapper, and he didn’t know if that would hold fingerprints or not. Maybe if they were smeared with chocolate. But no, he remembered now that he had thrown the wrapper out the window. He felt good about that. Maybe things were coming out better than he had expected.
’Course, he figured he’d have to do something with Mama, in case the cops came by to search. They might get a lead or something, and if they didn’t find anything there to make them suspicious, he’d be all right. But a rotting old woman in the bedroom in black plastic bags would be a sure tip-off. He had to find a way to get rid of her. Feed her to some dogs or something. There had to be a way.
Then again, what if he had been somehow identified and the cops had already searched, found Mama and her aroma? They could be lying in wait for him.
Bill went on like that for a time, his mind wandering aimlessly from one thought to another and not clinging to any one of them in a serious fashion.
He ducked under the water and came up with a handful of mud and rubbed it on his face and the back of his neck to keep back the mosquitoes. It worked pretty well. The cloud of mosquitoes diminished, if failed to vanish.
Bill swam to a clutch of logs in the middle of the swamp and clung there. The logs were rotting and they had drifted down into this slow part of the water and were dammed up there, as if resting. In their midst, Bill could see a floating Clorox bottle with a line on it. Someone’s homemade trot line most likely. He got hold of it and pulled on it to see if there might be a fish, but there wasn’t even a hook. Whatever might have been hooked had long broken loose. He let the Clorox bottle go. Free of the log jam it floated out into the middle of the water and collected green moss.
After about fifteen minutes of rest, hanging on the logs, being of service to hungry mosquitoes who had discovered an unprotected spot on the crown of his head, Bill struck out again.
He made another spit of dirt, crossed it, waded, swam, and did this routine until it was high noon and he was so hungry he thought if he could bend over far enough he’d gnaw his balls off.
Finally the swamp thinned, broke, and there was a barbed wire fence and a mushy stretch of pasture. Possibly the calf’s home before it wandered off in search of its fortune.
Bill started across the pasture, stepped in cow shit, saw some cows, and by late midday came to the end of the pasture and another barbed wire fence. He crossed the fence and kept walking. The ground had become more solid. He was finally getting away from the swamp and bottom land. The mosquitoes were less thick and less insistent. He was weak and hungry and hot and his head hurt all over from the mosquito bites. He felt as if he had been beat in the face with a rake.
Eventually he came to a thin line of trees and a creek. The water was fairly clear. He got down by the side of the creek and cupped his hands and pulled water out and drank it. His tongue was swollen and hot and the water felt and tasted pretty good, but there was a coppery aftertaste.
Perhaps he had swallowed some of the swamp water and it had made him sick, or maybe he had been sleeping with his mouth open and a batch of mosquitoes had enjoyed a tongue sandwich, and all this had thrown off his taste buds.
It didn’t matter. He was still thirsty, so he dipped his hand and drank more, but this time he realized the taste in his mouth was from the water.
He looked up the creek, saw there was a film in the water and the film was dark, the color of cough syrup. Bill went down the creek and around the bend and jumped back. There in the water, the top of his head blown off, his ankle stretched out and wrapped in some vines, was the deputy.
Bill squatted down and looked at him. The deputy’s jaw was gone and so was the top of his head. Bill could see that somehow the deputy had tripped and the sawed-off shotgun had gone off and caught the deputy under the chin and stopped him from cussing, walking, or anything else.
At first Bill was elated, then he realized that with the deputy missing a manhunt would go out for certain. Probably there was one already with the cops combing the area for the firecracker stand robbers, and when they found this deputy, boy were they going to be mad.
’Course, that still didn’t mean they knew he was involved. If he was careful, he might go undetected.
Bill crawled up to the other side of the creek and peeked through the thin line of trees there, saw something that surprised him.
PART TWO
Frost
Six
There was a huge pasture and the grass was cut way short and summer-burned to the color of a saltine cracker, and Bill knew if he stepped on it the grass would crackle like corn flakes. Parked on the pasture were a number of caravan-style trucks and silver trailers with brightly painted sides hooked up to semi-cabs, and there was an old station wagon and a motor home.
The trailers had pictures of weird people, wild animals, and snakes painted on them, and blazed across one in red paint was ODDITIES OF THE WORLD.
There was one shiny silver trailer off to the right, away from the others, as if placed there on special assignment. Painted on its side in black and blue
was a stocky, bearded wild man encased in a block of ice. The man was blue-skinned with black hair and the ice block was a lighter blue. Above this were the words ICE MAN written out as if in icicles.
There were a handful of people moving amongst the trailers and trucks, and even from a distance Bill could tell they were not normal folk. One was a tall lean pinheaded man in overalls and another was a woman with a beard and a green dress with some kind of dark pattern on it.
There were a number of others that Bill could not see well, and could only think of as being in various states of ugly. One actually ran on all fours, and had a spine bent like a horseshoe. A midget in a porkpie hat stood next to the bearded lady, as if ready to crawl under her dress and hide.
Bill settled down in the creek bed and looked at the dead deputy and wondered what he should do. He was surprised at how tired he was. The creek bed was cool and there was an indentation in it and the dirt was soft and damp, and without really realizing it, Bill made himself comfortable, and soon was asleep.
When Bill awoke he was famished and thirsty and none of it had been a dream. It was growing late and the sunlight had lessened, though it would be light until nine o’clock or so. Bill wondered what time it was. He went over to the deputy and checked to see if the deputy had a watch. He did.
Bill picked up the deputy’s arm and pulled it out of the water and looked at the watch on the corpse’s wrist. The watch was obviously waterproof. The second hand ticked away, and the time read seven forty-six.
Well I’ll be screwed and tattooed, thought Bill, I’ve slept for hours.
Bill dropped the deputy’s wrist, waded upstream away from the flow of blood from the deputy’s head—which had stopped, but the idea of it still bothered him—and dipped his hand in the water and scooped out a drink. The water felt good and tasted sweet at first, but soon it made his stomach hurt.
He decided he had to find food, no matter what. It was just the sort of thing that would make him fuck up, being this hungry. He had to have something to eat, even if he had to show himself to a bunch of freaks.
Bill came out of the creek and climbed over the bank and walked toward the caravan. There weren’t as many freaks as before, but he could see the guy who ran on all fours, and two that he had not seen earlier. They both appeared to have heads about the size and shape, if not the color, of jack-o’-lanterns. They were tossing a Frisbee back and forth, and the dog-man was running between them, leaping up, trying to grab the thing in his mouth. The meat heads laughed and the dog-man made a crude noise and kept at it.
Bill staggered in their direction. It was slightly warmer away from the riverbank, and Bill could see the late evening sun hanging low in the sky like a cracked fertile egg, leaking gold and yellow and blood-red chicken all over the horizon, seeping through the trees.
Scissortails darted across the sky in search of bugs, and Bill could hear cars out on the highway beyond, buzzing happily along with no concerns for lost heist money, wet Roman candles, dead deputies, or melting mothers in black plastic bags.
As Bill neared the trailers the meat heads ceased their game, paused to look at him. The dog-man didn’t seem to notice, and when one of the freaks lowered the Frisbee to his side, the dog-man snatched it from his hand with his mouth, ran in a circle and leaped and came down and saw Bill walking toward him. The Frisbee dropped from the dog-man’s mouth and he pushed his head in Bill’s direction, as if trying to recognize someone familiar. Bill got the impression the man might even be sniffing the air, but he was too far away to be certain.
As he grew nearer, the dog-man began to hop up and down like a mechanical pup, then bounded away in the direction of one of the trailers.
Bill didn’t realize it right off, but as he neared the freaks, he discovered he had both of his hands extended, palm up, beggar position. He was so hungry and so tired, so in need of anything and everything, he couldn’t help himself. He fell down twice, and pretty soon the freaks with the big heads had him under each arm and were half carrying, half dragging him toward the trailers.
Perhaps, he thought, I am an alien abductee, and a moment from now they’ll have me on a cold table with salad tongs spreading my butt cheeks and a cold wet alien finger up my ass. You hear about alien abductions, the asshole is always a prime target. And they liked to jack people off for sperm. He thought he could handle that part better than the finger up the ass. It might even be kind of restful.
When they were a few feet from the trailers, the dog-man and a large fiftyish man with thick snow white hair and eyebrows housing a couple of renegade black hairs appeared.
The man wore a nice white suit, a white and yellow checkered vest, a pearl white shirt, and a bow tie that was checked to match the vest. He had on shiny white shoes and thin white socks which were visible because the pants were a smidgen too short. Little white hairs poked through the thin socks. He looked at Bill in a quizzical manner, turning his head this way and that.
The dog-man was still bouncing, and now that he was close up, Bill could see that he was wearing gray coveralls. He had a dark elongated face that looked all the world like a dog snout, and beneath the snout there was a well-tended pencil-thin mustache. His ears had hair growing out of them, and his back legs ended in pithy nubs encased in leather bags drawn tight around his ankles. His hands were flat against the ground, and around the palm area he had wrapped some sort of padding.
The dog-man sat back on his haunches and kept repeating something over and over that Bill couldn’t quite make out because the dog-man spoke as if he might have a biscuit lodged in his throat.
Weak from hunger, Bill felt himself collapsing between the arms of the bulb heads, and pretty soon he lay on his back and the sky whirled blue and gray with orange at the fringes. The bulb heads bent over him.
He heard someone say, “Give him air,” and the bulb heads moved away. The face of the snow-headed man moved into his line of sight, and the man bent over him, and he felt the man’s hands at his chest, unbuttoning his shirt. He began to breathe better. He rolled his head to the side and smelled the drying grass, and from that angle he could see the last of the sunlight hanging between the trees, as if a giant with an inflamed hemorrhoid was mooning him.
The dog-man was repeating himself over and over, and finally Bill realized what it was he was saying.
“One of us. One of us. One of us.”
Seven
Bill had a fuse in his dick and it was being lit by the deputy. As the fuse burned down, taking his dick with it, nearing his balls, he knew there was going to be an explosion, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.
He just lay on his back on a little spit of land out in the middle of the swamp swarming with water moccasins, and couldn’t move. The deputy, whose jaw was hanging by a stringy strand of flesh, sat on a cypress stump and looked at Bill and moved what was left of his mouth. He couldn’t make a sound, but Bill knew he was saying, over and over, “Cocksucker. Cocksucker. Cocksucker.”
Bill tried to lift his hands to put out the fuse, but nothing happened. He was confused by this. He had lifted his hands often enough, and had certainly pulled his johnson under some pretty difficult circumstances (such as trying to concentrate while the smell of his dead mother floated into his bedroom from next door and stuck up in his nostrils thick as dirty cotton wads), but now, he couldn’t do a thing with his thing. The fuse was almost to his balls, and when it went, well, it was going to blow him all to hell and back, and it wasn’t going to do his nuts any good either.
He thought maybe he ought to let it burn down and go. Here he was, all worn out on an isle in a swamp surrounded by water moccasins, a dead deputy dripping his jaw on a stump nearby, and his dick burning away as he lay helpless on his back, so maybe he ought to just lie here and close his eyes and let it all go, blow him out of this life and into nothingness. What was the point of going on?
He lay there committed to doom, waiting to blow, then decided he couldn’t do that. Could
n’t just lie back and explode into nothingness. He felt stronger suddenly, reached for his dick, found it under a sheet, then heard, “One of us,” and opened his eyes.
“No, Conrad,” said the white-haired man. “I don’t think so. I think he’s some kind of accident.”
Bill considered this but couldn’t figure what the man meant by that. He was lying on a bed, naked under a sheet, holding himself, and the white-haired man was reaching over to lift his head with one hand and place a cup of water to his lips with the other.
Bill looked up into the white-haired man’s face. The face was somewhat fleshy and pink and the eyes were so blue they looked almost purple. The lips were pale, and there was a hint of white stubble on his upper lip and chin. There was a bright light behind the man’s head, and it shined through his pale hair and around his head and looked like a halo.
Bill drank.
The dog-man, Conrad, was nearby, almost even with the edge of the bed, snuffling near the old man’s elbow. Conrad lifted his head and poked it close to Bill’s face. Bill rolled his head toward Conrad’s strange snout and pulsating nostrils. He could see the neatly trimmed mustache, under the dog-man’s nose like a trained caterpillar. He was so tired he didn’t really feel surprised, disgusted, or amused. He didn’t feel much of anything.
The dog-man changed his snuffling from the old man’s elbow to Bill’s face. “One of us,” the dog-man said defiantly.
“Have it your way,” said the white-haired man, lowering the cup, then lowering Bill’s head onto the pillow. “How are you, son?”
Bill couldn’t speak. His tongue seemed too full in his mouth. He nodded.
“Can you sign?” said the white-haired man. “I can read sign.”
Bill shook his head.
Another face appeared. A young woman with short blond hair and a face sugary as a confection. She had a cute freckled nose, lips so red they looked as if they had been colored by a cherry snow cone. She was bouncy. She bent over him and he could smell her, and she smelled like fresh cut hay and wet sex and a dab of men’s cologne and a sheen of healthy sweat. Her eyes were almost black and he could see himself in them.