Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet (13 page)

“Ain’t that the knucklehead from the titty bar?” he said when he saw me.

I played it cool and said, “Sup.”

Smiley forced me to my knees.

Blubberguts dropped Eliza down in the dirt beside me.

Chains finished ogling Eliza and then returned his attention to me.

“The fuck’re you doing out here, boy?”

Smiley couldn’t wait to share the joke. “Hunting skunk ape.”

The Apes laughed their asses off.

Chains grinned at me. “That true, boy? You hunting skunk ape?”

Stalling for time, praying God would see me in my time of need, and divinely intervene, I told Chains and the rest of the Apes the whole sorry story.

It was a big hit with the Apes. They were all howling with laughter; even Smiley was almost in tears, covering his mouth to stifle his laughter and stop his dentures popping out. By the time I was done, I was cackling along with them. Saying it out loud, I had to admit the whole thing sounded fucking crazy. Like I’d smoked the whole batch of what they were cooking up inside.

Still chuckling, I said, “So you see, whatever you guys are doing out here, it’s none of our business. And what happened at The Henhouse—well, you already got your licks in. As far as I’m concerned, that’s all water under the bridge—”

“Like hell it is,” said Smiley, his dentures clacking like maracas.

“You can just let us go, and we’ll be on our way,” I said. “We won’t say a word to anyone.”

Chains scratched his stubble like he was seriously considering it.

Then he said, “Or we could just fucking kill you?”

My shoulders slumped. “There’s that, I suppose.” I cut an anxious glance at Eliza. “At least let the girl go.” Reggie Levine: Chivalrous to the bitter end.

“Let her go?” Chains cackled. “Shit, son—we been cooking all week. Reckon we deserve us a ree-ward for all our hard work.” He played to the Apes. “What d’you say, fellas?” I guessed that included Baby Doll. “Soon as we cook up this last batch we take Blondie here for a train ride.” The Apes howled like lusty wolves.

Eliza looked at me pleadingly.

I couldn’t meet her eyes. “I’m sorry, Eliza …”

She slumped forwards in the dirt, raking her hands in the earth.

“What about
this
asshole?” Smiley said.

He prodded me in the back of the skull with his AK.

Before Chains could answer, I jerked my head to the side, and the barrel of Smiley’s AK slid past my shoulder. I grabbed the barrel and yanked it, pulling Smiley down towards me as I sprang to my feet and slammed the back of my skull into his chin. His dentures shattered with a sound like Fast Eddie Felson breaking pool balls and he crumpled to the ground. Clutching the AK by the barrel, I swung it like a club against Blubberguts’s skull. The stock impacted with a meaty thud, jarring the gun from my hands. The big man avalanched down on top of Smiley. There was no time for me to retrieve the AK. Eliza flung double fistfuls of dirt into the faces of Chains, Shitface, and Baby Doll, and as they staggered back, blinded, choking on dust, I grabbed Eliza’s wrist and we ran.

As we jinked through the maze of junk farming equipment, someone fired a gun, and the shot pinged off a tractor with a flash of sparks.

“Don’t shoot!” Chains cried. “You’ll blow us all sky-high!”

I dragged Eliza towards the barn. We scrambled inside and slammed the door and bolted it shut with a horizontal bar. Seconds later, the Apes started hammering and hurling themselves against it, the door shuddering violently under the assault. Then Smiley must have found an axe from somewhere. He started hacking at the door like Jack Nicholson doing his “Here’s Johnny!” number. Smiley glared at me through the splintered slats, his lips bloodied and torn by his shattered dentures. “Muggerfugger! Goo broge by teeb! Again!” He continued hacking his way through the door. It wasn’t going to hold for much longer.

I looked around wildly for a weapon. Just cobwebs and straw—unless the Apes were arachnophobic, or suffered from hay fever, we were shit out of luck. The barn was too dingy for me to see much of anything else. On either side of us were livestock stalls. At the end of the barn, a rickety ladder led up to the hayloft. I started dragging Eliza towards the ladder—when in doubt,
climb
—but she dug in her heels and refused to move. “Mr. Levine!” She gripped my hand till the knuckles popped. “That smell …” I was about to tell her that the funky odor was the least of our problems, when I recognized the stench, and I glanced into the livestock stall from which it was wafting.

Huddled in the gloomy stall, curled in a fetal ball, was Ned, still wearing his Boogaloo Baboon costume. If simians have a hell, Boogaloo called it home. His blood-matted fur was ripped out in mangy patches. His tail had been yanked off at the root. The once proud red-cushion ass of the baboon costume was torn out to reveal Ned’s skinny butt, which looked in even worse condition than the costume, his buttocks scratched and caked with blood.

“Ned?” I gasped.

What the hell had the Apes been doing to the poor bastard?

Boogaloo flinched at the sound of my voice; Ned whimpered inside the baboon mask. “Please …” he rasped. “Please, no more …”

“Ned, it’s me.” I crouched down beside him. “It’s Reggie.”

Grunting with effort, Ned raised the heavy baboon mask off the ground. A hole had been gouged through it. A glazed eye peered out at me. It reminded me of the photos I’d seen of Vietnam vets returning from a tour of duty. The thousand-yard stare.

“Reggie?” Like he wasn’t sure if he was imagining things. “Is … is it really you?”

And then he started to sob, a pitiful broken sound.

“It’s okay, Ned,” I said. “You’re gonna be okay.” Not strictly true—not with the Apes breaking down the barn door—but at least now Ned wouldn’t die alone.

“Oh, thank God—” Ned bawled, clutching at me. “I thought … I thought that thing was gonna hump me to death.”

I frowned.

“What thing?”

That’s when the skunk ape dropped down from the hayloft.

It landed with a heavy thud behind Eliza and me. With a terrified shriek, Ned scuttled to the far end of the stall and curled himself into a protective ball. I whirled towards the beast, shielding Eliza behind me. I had time to think: For a skunk ape, the damn thing looked a lot like an orangutan—And then it snatched my head in a huge leathery paw, Eliza’s in the other, and smashed our skulls together like cymbals, and down I went like a TV with the plug pulled.

When I came to, I was flat on my back in the yard outside the farmhouse. Eliza was sprawled in the dirt beside me, out-cold. A nasty-looking lump, where the skunk ape had cracked our skulls together, protruded through her hair like a pink anthill.

I forced myself to sit—regretted it instantly—clutching my head as if afraid it would crumble to dust in my hands. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I saw the barn door clapping open and shut in the breeze, and a rutted trail in the dirt where the skunk ape must have dragged us from the barn to the farmhouse.

Except it wasn’t a skunk ape.

It was an orangutan—just as I’d thought before it put me to sleep— wearing calf-length cargo shorts, and a biker vest with the Motorcycle Club’s patch on the back. His shoulder was bandaged, the gauze sodden with blood, where he must have been wounded by the shrapnel of splinters when the elephant gun cored the tree. The first thing that struck me was the stench—it staggered me back like a physical blow—the ape reeked like a Grizzly had excreted a whole colony of skunks before wiping its ass on his fur. A halo of flies buzzed drunkenly above his head. He was an ugly brute, too. Maybe even harsher on the eye than Baby Doll. His face was hashtagged with battle scars, the skin leathery and cracked like an old cowboy’s saddle, or Charles Bronson in one of the later
Death Wish
pictures. His filthy fur was tangled into ruddy brown dreadlocks. The whiskers around his muzzle were salted gray like a silvery Fu Manchu mustache. His dull amber eyes seemed only slightly less human than the rest of the Damn Dirty Apes. And they were sizing me up in a way that made my balls shrink to the size of chickpeas, as if he couldn’t decide if he wanted to fight me or fuck me. I could scarcely imagine the living hell poor Ned must have endured as this monster had its way with him.

Chains said, “There’s your skunk ape, asshole.”

So far I’d mistaken a black bear and an orangutan for a skunk ape; and yet never once had I looked in my shaving mirror and mistaken myself for George Clooney. The only thing I can say in my defense was that the beast
smelled
like you’d expect a skunk ape to smell; like a wet pack mule saddled with shitty diapers.

Chains said to the orangutan, “Say hello to our guests, Mofo.”

Things were plenty weird enough already; if the orangutan actually started talking, I thought I would scream. Mercifully, the ape just blew a raspberry and flipped me the bird. Exactly like he did to Walt from the sidecar, that night at The Henhouse—and just like that, the final piece of the jigsaw fell into place.

The only thing I still couldn’t figure was that big pile of shit and the bike tracks we’d found in the Sticks. I guessed the Apes had been on their way out to Herb’s farm when they’d stopped for Mofo to pinch a loaf. Who knows how Baby Doll lost the doll’s head from her necklace? And hell, I really wasn’t giving it much thought, focused as I was on the big-ass ugly orangutan glaring at me.

“We won him in a game of cards from a fella runs a roadside zoo,” Chains said. “Mofo’s been riding with us for years now.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the sidecar attached to his hog, just in case I thought the orangutan had his own bike, although right then, nothing would have surprised me. “Full-blood member. Somewhere under all that fur, he’s even got the ink.”

It was all I could do just to shake my head in disbelief.

“We was holed up in a motel outside Jasper,” Chains explained, “try’na figure out where we was gonna cook. Shawna’s got the TV playing—” He glanced at Baby Doll. “What was it you was watching, girl?”

Baby Doll thought long and hard. “
Mike & Molly
?”

Chains rolled his eyes and sighed. “After
Mike & Molly
, you dumb cunt.”

“Oh,” Baby Doll said.

Chains stressed to me, “We wasn’t watching
Mike & Molly
.”

“Sure you weren’t,” I said.

Chains looked like he wanted to press the point.

Then Baby Doll said, “
The Unexplained Files
.”

Chains snapped his fingers. “
The Unexplained Files
,” he nodded. “It just come on the TV like a sign from God. A special ‘bout the Bigelow Skunk Ape. ‘Cording to the show, moonshiners made him up to scare folks away from their whiskey stills. An’ that’s when it hits me. Alls we need is for the Bigelow Skunk Ape to make a reappearance, and then the Sticks is ours to do with what we please. We can cook up our shit without nobody coming out here n’ bothering us. Just like the moonshinin’ days. So we send Mofo off to scare the shit outta some dumbass yokels. Figured it’d be a fisherman or a hiker or something.” Chains looked at Eliza reproachfully. “Not a buncha freaks making a fuck-flick … Anyway, sure enough, word spreads about the ‘Skunk Ape’ and folks stayed away—until now.”

“You would’ve got away with it too,” I said, “if it wasn’t for us pesky kids.”

Chains grinned at me. “Something I didn’t count on,” he said, “there’d be anybody damn fool enough to come looking for the fucking thing.”

“He kidnapped a friend of ours,” I said.

“That wasn’t part of the plan,” Chains admitted. “But in Mofo’s defense, your friend was dressed provocatively in that baboon costume. Mofo took one look at that big red butt and fell in love. When he brung the fella back here, I didn’t see no harm in letting Mofo have some sport. And it’s a braver man than me who’ll stand in the way of a randy orangutan and his mate.”

I glanced at the orangutan, shivering in the heat of its gaze.

Mofo peeled off his biker vest and tossed it to Shitface. He started pacing the dooryard, stomping his huge feet, pinwheeling his arms and chinking his neck.

“Whoa—” I said. “The hell’s it doing?”

“Limbering up,” Chains said.

Sick fear shuddered through me. “Limbering up for what?”

Chains gave a throaty chuckle. “Take it easy, sport. Unless you’re planning on slipping into your buddy’s baboon costume, I reckon you’re safe.”

Then he grinned at me and said, almost purring, “
Reggie Levine
…
”

I tried not to show my surprise that he knew my name.

“You know,” he said, “I saw you fight Boar Hog Brannon.”

“If you could call it that,” I said.

“Always wondered how Boar Hog’s fists took all that punishment.”

“My head wondered the same thing.”

“Heard you hung up your gloves after that?”

“Figured I’d quit while I was behind.”

“Never tempted to lace ‘em back up?”

I cut an anxious glance at the orangutan.

“Nope,” I said, not liking where this conversation was going.

“Shame,” Chains said. “It took true grit sticking it out with Boar Hog for as long as you done …” He turned to the other Apes. “In fact, I reckon ‘The Bigelow Bleeder’ Reggie Levine could last … oh, let’s call it four minutes versus Mofo.”

“Four minutes?” Shitface scoffed. “Bullshit! I’ll take me summa that action.”

The Apes started placing bets. I noticed that none of them were betting on me to win. They were wagering how quickly Mofo would beat me to death.

“Wait a minute—” I staggered to my feet. “You don’t honestly expect me to fight an orangutan, do you?”

“What’s the problem?” Chains said. “Mofo’ll give you a fair fight.” He seesawed his hand. “Ish.” He shadowboxed a few lefts and rights. “Taught him myself.”

“This … this is crazy,” I stammered. “I’m not fighting a fucking monkey!”

Chains nodded like he understood perfectly. “Then I guess you’re getting beat to death by one.”

Eliza came awake with a groan. Reaching for her head, she hissed in pain as her fingers prodded the lump on her skull. She glanced around at the Apes. Then she saw the orangutan and her eyes bugged with shock. She clutched at my leg.