Banana Hammock (2 page)

I grinned at my clever pun, but Lulu didn’t see the humor.

“I
am
Amish,” she said. “Why would I lie about that? Do you think I’m lying? What good would it do me to lie?”

“Ease off the throttle, Goldilocks. You’re too high strung. Let me rent this costume, and I’ll blend into your quaint, idyllic community without anyone noticing, and find out who Amos is snogging.”

A moment later, Weston had returned with full Amish regalia for me.

“Pay for it, tootsiepop,” I told Lulu. Then I went into the dressing room, to get dressed. But halfway into putting on my pants, the magic of Combville ensnared me, and half an hour later someone was knocking on the door.

“Mr. McGlade?”

“Call me Sexybeast,” I said. “That was my childhood nickname.”

Actually, my childhood nickname was
Bitch Tits
. But that made me cry.

“Are you okay in there?”

I finished dressing and opened the door. “I’m fine, baby. I’ve been dressing myself since high school.”

She let out a deep sigh. “I was worried. I thought you figured out I was faking this Amish thing, and had taken off.”

“I figured out no such thing. We ready to rock?”

Lulu nodded. Weston came up to us, grinning. “You look terrific, Harry. Here’s one final touch.

He pinned a button to my coat. It said
Amish is as Good as a Mile
. Now my disguise was perfect. No one would ever know I was an imposter, living among the God-fearing.

But did I truly know enough about this mysterious and elusive race of prehistoric proto-humans known as the Amish? Was I ready to delve into their strange cult where they worshipped some imaginary savior named Jesus? Perhaps I needed to do some research before diving in.

Should Harry research the Amish? If so,
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.

Should Harry just delve right into the case? If so,
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.

I Googled “Amish” on my iPhone and wound up surfing several Amish porn sites, where I learned that their culture dates back to 1693, they’re pacifists, and that threeways—mostly girl-girl-guy—were common.

After two minutes of exhaustive research, I gave up. Don’t get me wrong. I like pornography as much as the next guy, if the next guy watches porn sixteen hours a day. But I was on a case, and nothing was going to deter me from finding out if Amos Coleslaw was cheating on his wife. So after a brief, forty-minute Combville session, Lulu and I hopped in my car and headed to Indiana.

To continue with the case,
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To instead read
Pride and Prejudice with Sexy Vampires
,
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The ride to Indiana was uneventful, except for those strange lights in the sky that we saw but really don’t remember too well, and somehow we lost six hours and my butt hurts and I’ve got weird dreamlike memories about being strapped to a table and probed by skinny gray guys with huge black eyes. But other than that, nothing noteworthy happened.

When we arrived in the Amish settlement of Plaintown, I parked next to a Cadillac, put on my straw hat, and went with Lulu to find her husband. The day was sunny, and everywhere I looked there were crops and people tending crops. It seemed like a really croppy way to live.

“So, which one is Amos?” I asked Lulu.

“That’s Amos over there.” She pointed to a plain looking guy with a beard. I nodded, rolling up my sleeves. I’d been working this case for long enough. It was time to get some answers. Amos would tell me what I wanted to know, even if I had to beat on that pacifist all night and into tomorrow.

“You’re sure these guys are pacifists, right?” I asked Lulu.

She shrugged, checking the messages on her cell phone. “I guess. Hit one a few times and see.”

I stormed over. Seeing all of this peaceful cooperation and brotherly love was pushing my anger to an all-time high. I walked through the wheat, or the corn, or whatever it was, fists clenched and jaw set.

“Hey! You! With the beard!”

Eight men looked at me.

“I meant the one named Amos!”

“We’re all named Amos,” one of the Amoses said.

“No,” I clarified, “the one wearing black!”

Since they all wore black, they looked at each other, confused.

“The one with the beard wearing black and the straw hat!”

More shrugs and confusion.

“The one pooping in the field!”

My victim said, “That’s me.” After wiping with a nearby plant, he pulled up his black pants and offered his hand. I didn’t take it, because it had crop all over it.

“Can, I help you, Brother?” he asked, polite and peacefullike.

“You and your non-violent stance make me sick,” I said. “Who do you think you are, going around, not hitting anybody? Tell me something, braniac, how would we defend this great country of ours if the whole world suddenly turned into pacifists?”

“Your beard is coming off.”

“Don’t sass me,” I said, slapping that non-threatening look right off his face. I braced myself, waiting for him to hit me back. He didn’t. But even if he tried to, I wasn’t worried. The guy had to be at least ninety years old.

I slapped him again.

“That’s for beating your wife, you peaceful old man. Shame on you for picking on someone who can’t defend themselves.”

“My wife is dead, Brother.”

This made my fury even furiouser. “You killed her? You heartless, God-fearing man of the earth!”

“Say, Brother, what’s going on here?”

I looked around, and saw the Amish had surrounded me. I don’t scare easily, except during scary movies and lightning storms and being in rooms with too many minorities.
Diversity
was another way of saying
put your wallet in your front pocket
. But being surrounded by pacifists made my heart turn into ice.

Well, actually, my heart didn’t really turn into ice. If it did, I’d be dead. Then I couldn’t be telling you this story in the first person.

“Back off! Everyone! This man here cheated on his dead wife, who hired me.”

I pointed at Lulu, but she’d vanished.

“What did you do with her body, you gray-bearded bastard!” I slapped him again.

“See here, Brother,” said one of the younger, healthier-looking Amish. He seemed about my age and height, so I backed away from him.

“Keep your distance,” I warned him. “I’m not looking for a fair fight.”

“There must be some misunderstanding. Why don’t we go inside and discuss this over some apple pie?”

I laughed. “You think you can bribe me with three slices of pie with homemade ice cream on top? Who do you think I am? Some sort of pie lover?”

Should Harry accept the pie? If so,
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.

Should Harry keep beating defenseless Amish ass? If so,
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.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

A sexy vampire wife!

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?”

Mr. Bennet—who was a SEXY VAMPIRE!—bit her on the neck and bled that nosy bitch dry. Then she became a vampire, and they had hot vampire sex, sucking each other in ways that made them both go, “Oooooo, that’s nice.” They even installed a mirror above the bed. But that didn’t really do much.

Then the sun came up and they both caught on fire turned to dust.

The end.

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To read
The Ugly Duckling Does Meth
,
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It was so beautiful out on the country, it was summer—the wheat fields were golden, the oats were green, and down among the green meadows the hay was stacked, and so was the farmer’s daughter, Roxy, whose breasts were the size of country hams, but without the brown sugar glaze. There Roxy sulked about in her shiny pleather jacket and torn black fishnets, scowling a lot, fiddling with one of the five piercings in her right eyebrow. Roxy was a Goth, and had so many piercings that magnets would leap off the refrigerator and stick to her face when she walked past, which made her scowl even more. Yes, it was indeed lovely out there in the country, but to Roxy it might as well have been a diaper landfill, judging by the unhappy expression on her face.

Roxy was a meth dealer.

In the midst of the sunshine there stood an old manor house that had a deep moat around it. From the walls of the manor right down to the water’s edge great burdock leaves grew, and there were some so tall that little children could stand upright beneath the biggest of them, though none of them knew what the word “burdock” meant and had to look it up in the Nook dictionary, just like you’re about to do. In this wilderness of leaves, which was as dense as the forests itself, denser even than a Mongoloid child dropped down a flight of stairs, a duck sat on her nest, hatching her ducklings. She was becoming somewhat weary, because the welfare check hadn’t come yet, and she needed a snort of ice soon or she was going to chew off her own face.

Then, Roxy hooked her up, and so began a downward spiral that soon had her giving handjobs for fifty cents down at the old folks’ home, losing her teeth, and eventually overdosing and dying in an alley, rotting in a pool of her own feces. Seventeen elderly men came to her funeral, which was actually quite nice. They served little cakes.

The end.

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To read
Huckleberry Finn: The Director’s Cut
,
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You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

Now the way that the book winds up is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave. Then we got rip-roarin’ drunk and blew the cash on whores. Tom’s was so old her hips crackled like fried pig skins, and mine had sores on her feminine parts that smelled like rotten chicken feet. Now I got me some sores too, ’ceptin’ they’re on my slappin’ stick, which bleeds when I pee. Hurts, too. Like someone is shoving a maple branch up the piss hole and twistin’ it hard.

Then some men came and hung Miss Watson’s slave, Jim.

Also, my Pap raped me in the bum.

The end.

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To read the
Book of Genesis with Zombies
,
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.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be zombies: and there were zombies. And the zombies spread across the land, riding around on dinosaurs, eating people and turning them into more zombies. And then the dinosaurs also became zombies. And then Cain slew Able, and ate him, and they both ate Moses, which angered the Lord, because there was no eating on the Sabbath.

And on the seventh day, God rested. And He hasn’t been back to work since.

Then the Jews killed Jesus, and seized control of the media and the banks.

Also, the earth is only five thousand years old.

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To quit this case and have Harry take a different case about private schools,
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Bored with the Amish, I put that case on hold and went back to my office to take a new case.

“Cute kid,” I said.

The kid looked like a large pink watermelon with buck teeth and bug eyes. If I hadn’t already known it was a girl, I couldn’t have guessed from the picture. What was that medical name for children with a overdeveloped heads? Balloonheadism? Bigheaditis? Melonoma? Freak?

“She takes after her mother.”

Yeeech. My fertile mind produced an image of a naked Mrs. Potatohead, unhooking her bra. I shook away the thought and handed the picture back to the proud Papa.

“Where is Mom, by the way?”

Mr. Morribund leaned close enough for me to smell his lunch—tuna fish on rye with a side order of whiskey. He was a thin guy with big eyes who wore an off-the-rack suit with a gold
Save The Dolphins
tie tack.

“Emily doesn’t know I’m here, Mr. McGlade. She’s at home with little Rosemary. Since we received the news she’s been… upset.”

“I sympathize. Getting into the right pre-school can mean the difference between summa cum laude at Harvard and offering mouth sex in back alley Dumpsters for crack money. I should know. I’ve seen it.”

“You’ve seen mouth sex in back alley Dumpsters?”

I nodded my head in what I hoped what looked like a sad way. “It isn’t pretty, Mr. Morribund. Not to look at, or to smell. But I don’t understand how you expect me to get little Rotisserie—”

“It’s Rosemary.”

“—little Rosemary into this school if they already turned down your application. Are you looking for strong-arm work?”

“No, nothing like that.”

I frowned. I liked strong-arm work. It was one of the perks of being a private eye. That and breaking and entering.

“What then? Breaking and entering? Some stealing, maybe?”

I liked stealing.

Morribund swallowed, his Adam’s apple wiggling in his thin neck. If he were any skinnier he wouldn’t have a profile.

“The Salieri Academy is the premier pre-school in the nation, Mr. McGlade. They have a waiting list of thousands, and to even have a chance at attending you have to fill out the application five years before your child is conceived.”