Onion Songs (8 page)

SHOPLIFTER

An old man leaves a large downtown department store with an enormous lump under his coat.

Stop, thief! cries the store manager rushing up behind him and grabbing his elbow.

Remove your hand, the old man tells him, it
’s only a large, malignant tumor I have.

The store manager opens the man
’s coat and removes the refrigerator there, carrying it back into the store on his back.

An old man leaves a large downtown department store with an even larger lump under his coat.

Stop, thief! cries the store manager as he rams his head into the old man’s back.

Why, it
’s only a committee of concerned citizens I have here, the old man says, nothing more.

The store manager opens the coat and pushes the down escalator back into his store.

An old man leaves a large downtown department store with an enormous black shadow almost hiding him.

Stop, thief! Will you never learn? cries the store manager as he leaps on the old man
’s head.

It
’s merely a cemetery, you funny little man, replies the old man.

Whereupon the store manager rips open the coat, revealing the hundreds of faces of his best customers, all staring out, sightless, their skin pale, lips cracked.

And their torn hands and arms pulling the store manager in...

BRAIN OF SHADOWS

While he was asleep someone played with a flashlight in his head.

The intruder was silent but betrayed his or her presence when sudden flashes illuminated the figures in the dream, making them cower and cover their eyes and revealing the landscape they walked in to be no more than paper, plaster, and cheap paint.

Have some courtesy
, he mumbled in his sleep, and his dream folk nodded their agreement.

The intruder stumbled and accidentally flashed the light on himself to reveal a biblical figure in long white robes and a beard.

The next night the dream folk were all wearing dark glasses and the body of God lay broken and bleeding behind the sets.

ATTACHED

A mother takes needle and thread and attaches herself to her first born, a daughter.

A father weeps and shouts, What have you done to attach her so? How can you both live that way?

A daughter sews the first boy she finds to her left leg. Later she attaches an older, more attractive boy to her right thigh.

Eventually she has young men attached to her feet, head, shoulders, breast, buttocks, and groin.

I
’m afraid it’s becoming quite difficult for us to walk, a mother comments in long-suffering resignation.

A father just weeps and wrings his hands over the foolishness of females.

A daughter attaches children with tighter and firmer stitches to all exposed parts of her body, until her own body is quite hidden by the bodies sewn to her.

Each child displays his
or her own small needle and thread.

See, see what you have done! a father shouts at a mother.
We’ve
lost our daughter; she must be quite dead under there!

All the small children plead tearfully for their mother, once a daughter, even as they begin attaching food, feces, playthings, and other children to their own bodies with needles and thread.

Help, help, I’m quite suffocated! shouts a mother as she falls over backwards, pulling the mass of squirming, sewn-together bodies on top of her.

A father stoops over the crushed body of his wife, weeping and wringing his hands over the foolishness of females. He shuffles sadly away, absentmindedly scratching at the sewn-on corpse of his son, their second born, crushed so long ago between his great buttocks.

THE RIFLEMAN, THE CANCEROUS COW, AND THE SWEDISH MEMORIAL HOSPITAL,
A Western

Lucas McCane, formerly known as The Rifleman, had put away his famous weapon with the enlarged firing ring, and moved to North Carolina so that his son Mark might grow up among deciduous trees and shrubbery.

“This will all be yours someday,” he told him. “This wooded area here, this lake I’ve recently dammed and drained for cropland (at great physical cost to myself, by the way), and there’s a nice little fast food franchise down there by the creek where members of your peer group eat hamburgers, shakes, and fries, and converse on various age-appropriate subject matters. It’s taken me most of my life, made me old before my time, not to mention quite impotent, but I was glad to do it for my eventual posterity, please don’t mention it.”

One day Mark and his father were walking through the wooded area, Lucas talking on in this manner, Mark listening, when they came upon a level clearing covered with a thin film of oil.
“This bog has been here for millions of years, Mark, consisting of various animal and vegetative matter pressurized underground, then later exposed for our current viewing, but nevertheless, this too will all be yours when I go to meet that Great Ranch-hand in the sky,” Lucas went on and on.

Suddenly a large black cow with a cancer on his head stumbled out of the underbrush. And before Lucas could point out that that too would someday belong to his son, Mark spoke up for the first time in some while, saying,
“Pa, what’s that?”

“
That, son, is a large black cow with a cancer on his head. Notice how he eats large stumps and other useless vegetative matter around this here bog. A cow with a cancer on his head must be pretty clever to survive out here in the wilds of North Carolina.”

It suddenly became apparent to Lucas and his son that the cancerous cow was lapping up great swatches of the oil with an enormous, rubbery, gr
ay and white tongue. And gradually revealed by these great swipes of the tongue was a smooth, hardwood floor. “No doubt created through the troddings of extinct land reptiles on the decomposing animal and vegetative matter, compressing these into this smooth dancefloor-like surface we see here before us,” Lucas speculated, “...though I have to admit this is somewhat unusual for North Carolina.”

During this speech the cow had completed his vacuuming, and a perfectly square, glistening orange hardwood plain, two hundred feet on a side, was revealed, bordered on all sides by rotting stumps and blackened underbrush. Lucas strode to the middle of this floor.
“This, son...”

“
...will someday all be mine,” Mark interjected.

Lucas painted an elaborate image of the mansion they would someday build using the floor as base. A wide portico all around, several entranceways, an im
mense expanse of glass, and several vistas of awe-inspiring aspect. Lucas counted some of these off on his fingertips: the curtain of gigantic pine, the plateau gauzed in grays and purples, the broad grassy slope flowered yellow, red, and blue, and... what was this?

Mark had run past the tall marble columns, the coved ceilings, the exotic tapestries of the home place, and was climbing the fan-like marble staircase of this last unexpected vista, The Swedish Memorial Hospital.

Lucas stared slack-jawed at the ruin. The Swedish Memorial Hospital was a five-level complex, each level built on the ruins of the former. Castle turrets meshed with steel framing and glass walls, stucco and wood. The several hundred yards of skylight had been shattered. Six brightly painted hot air balloons and two large dirigibles hung torn and abandoned from spires and eaves. Vines and weeds crept up between cracks and holes in the concrete. He could just make out the scarlet thread remnants of the banners. On the plain behind the hospital he could see the ashen wrecks of dozens of flying fortresses, once used to transport the wounded from all parts of the globe.

Mark was halfway up the stairs when Lucas snapped out of his reverie, panicked, and raced screaming after him.

But too late... the Rifleman could see already that he would fail. Already the young men in their red pageboy costumes were trumpeting at the top of the staircase. Already spiders, lizards, and snails were creeping out of the ruined masonry. Somewhere bands were playing, women dancing in their fine robes, great stallions pawing the pebbles atop the stone walls. Already The Pilot, that career intruder, was standing haughtily next to his gigantic saddled alligator, whistling, and cheering Mark on to the top of his stairs, into The Pilot’s waiting arms.

And already The Rifleman knew his son would soon leave North Carolina, would never till the family lands, own the cancerous cow, or build the family mansion of many vistas on the primeval hardwood floor.

The Rifleman, formerly known as Lucas McCane, collapsed at the Swedish Memorial Hospital staircase, and wept bitterly over this failure of his imagination.

JUNGLE J.D.

You can keep on mockin
’, but I can’t stop rockin’...

Tony couldn
’t believe his luck. Here he had himself a
bad
girl. Joy, the baddest girl he’d ever known, and not only was she
with
him, but she was with him in a stolen Chevy making it ninety miles an hour cross-country on Route 66, and how’s that for some kind of rock ’n’ roll legendary-type road trip? Halfway between Las Vegas, New Mexico and Santa Fe now, give or take a few tumbleweeds. The sky wide open for dreams. It was like some kind of goddamned movie! The gang was going to shit, if he ever saw the gang again. Maybe he’d send them a picture postcard, with one of them hotdog stands shaped just like a coney on it, send it to Carson’s Drugstore so they all could read it. Cool, man.

“
Long as nobody got hurt.” That’s what his grandma woulda told him. Long as nobody got hurt—like that was the answer for everything. And maybe it was. But sometimes the answers run out, Grandma, and people, well you know people
do
get hurt. And deep down, Tony knew he much preferred it be the other guy what got hurt.

Tony turned his head once again to moon over Joy, and he was so excited, and it felt like maybe his head went a little too far, and he liked the feeling, so then it was like his head was spinning around like a record, but unevenly, so that every song played had a roughness to it, his head playing some angry song like Link Wray
’s “Rumble” over and over again. He could still see Joy through his dizziness: sitting all pretty in her yellow Capri pants and pink sweater, wearing his black leather jacket—
his
—even though he’d only had it about a week he didn’t mind—she just looked too cool sitting there with her pink-framed shades, puffing on another Kool and moving her butt slow with the rock of the car, making that crisp vinyl snapping sound in that rollin’ rhythm like they were maybe doing it on his grandma’s bedsprings.

Course they
hadn’t
done it yet, even though she was so damned hot she was too cool, in charge like, but they
would
do it, Tony knew, he could tell by the way she kept her tongue in his mouth longer than any bad girl ever had before.

Tony had been in love four times in his life for sure, but this time it was the best, the very best, the coolest, the wildest.
Lots better than when he was in love with plain Jane Atkins, and her daddy had to drive them places, and she didn’t like it that he smoked, said it made him taste bad, not that there was
that
much tasting going on, what with her old man hanging around all the time. And miles better than the Thompson twins—when they slapped you, well, you knew you’d been slapped.

“
Goddamn!” Tony shouted out the window, then howled just like Wolfman Jack, just like Lon Chaney having an orgasm. He turned to Joy to catch her cool reaction and she smiled this thin, cool smile at him and blew a smoke ring. Goddamn, he wished he could blow smoke rings like Joy.

And that was about the time
it
happened.

The
its
in Tony’s life were always different, and always big. The last it was when he decided to blast out of New Jersey and head west, taking Joy with him and using whatever transportation he could find, having it somewhere in the back of his head that they would make it to California somehow and the Beach.

It was old man Perkins
’s car he took, who’d just happened to have put a new tune on the vehicle, and was sitting there at the time drinking a brew with just the happiest look on his face. Tony had had to knock that smile off him when Perkins tried to stop him from taking the car. That was too bad, really it was, because Tony much preferred nobody getting hurt. That was his one rule, which was saying a lot, given how Tony felt about rules. But even that rule was a preference, because above all else Tony wasn’t going to be stopped. It was only natural, the law of the jungle and everything. Ungawa! A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. He wondered if he could wrap his mouth around Joy’s pink and slippery tongue and still maintain a steady ninety miles per. Hell, nothing ventured; nothing gained.

But right then Tony thought about his grandma, and that took a little bit of the fire out of him.
Hell, she’d raised him and bailed him, and that had to count for something. Maybe at least she’d have a good funeral to attend someday, let her be the center of attention for once, everybody feeling sorry for this old lady who’d been saddled with this J.D. from hell when his own momma, her daughter, died on that sleazoid boyfriend’s motorcycle. Anybody could have been the daddy, and that meant no daddy at all, which was just fine with old Tone. Tony had left that sweet old grandmother of his all alone in their apartment. She was practically blind and she could hardly walk, so he knew it wasn’t a very nice thing to do. But what else could a fellow do? A guy just couldn’t be thinking about his grandmother all the time. It was like living with dead people.

Which he almost was, a couple of times, maybe three.
He had a round scar the size of one of Joy’s smoke rings on his forehead from that last fight with the Seventh Street Slashers. He’d open his eyes sometimes while he and Joy were kissing and he’d catch her with her eyes open, staring at
it
. Bad girls kept their eyes open when they kissed—he’d concluded that a long time ago.

Tony kind of wondered sometimes if maybe that scar was one reason he and Joy hadn
’t done it yet, her being grossed out or something, when he realized he was right in the middle of another big
it
because the goddamned car was rolling over and over and Joy had this funny look on her face—still cool—but her mouth was wide open but no sounds were coming out, just smoke ring after smoke ring.

It was then Tony realized what tune was playing on the radio.
“Runaway,” by Del Shannon, one of his absolutest favorites, but he had a feeling he might miss the end of the song. Things were spinning pretty good now, and there were little green alien types, like huge frogs, clinging to the windshield even as the car turned over and over: little green men looking in on him and Joy.

*

Tony woke up hot and wet like he had his head stuck to Carson’s fry grill. Meat was popping and sizzling, smelly enough to make his mouth water.

He opened his eyes and salt sweat washed down from his forehead and everything went blurry.
Then he remembered what had just happened and he tasted some of the stuff at the corners of his mouth expecting blood, but it was sweat like he thought, but a little heavier than he’d expected, almost like oil. He wiped the crap out of his eyes with the back of his hand.

Green surrounded him, bent down and hugged him, smothering him in tits and hair all green.
He breathed it in and tried to lick it in and out of his mouth, unable to get enough. Then the green cleared a little and he could see more: the Chevy’s radiator steaming and hissing, lying on top of a dead hippo whose meat was roasting in the shape of that very same radiator. Roast hippo meat wasn’t a bad smell, but it was too early in the morning to be thinking about hippo burgers, so pretty soon his belly was spinning just like the car. Which there was no other sign of. But then he realized “Runaway” was still playing, although a much rougher version than he’d ever heard before, like they’d overlaid a new track with a lot of fuzz pedal in it. He looked up to find where the soundtrack for this dream was coming from: there was the radio, just the radio, all lit up but with no visible source of electrical power, sitting in the lower branches of a big palm tree. Now playing the opening to “Surf City.”

“
Here we come,” Tony mumbled, “Sweet Buddy Holly.” Then he threw up.

*

Tony looked up into a sky full of green and hair. He could hear his grandmother crying in the distance. He could hear the preacher man speaking to a milling crowd he could damn well hear but could not see.

“
He hath lived fast. He hath died young. He hath delivered unto us a good-lookin’ corpse.”

Tony opened his eyes wide.
The preacher was looking down from heaven right at him, and he looked like an ape. He
was
an ape. Then there were other ape heads right up there beside the first one: a row of smiling, goof ball coconuts.

“
Ah, jeez...”

One of the apes covered Tony
’s face with a leathery palm and pushed him back against the ground. Then they were dragging him faster and faster through the jungle, his head bouncing off fallen trees, rocks, and hardened lion crap. Tony had visions of being nurtured and raised by these apes, learning their ape language, becoming skilled in their jungle ways, being part of a jungle gang that roamed and hunted and killed, that did pretty much whatever they pleased. Then they came to a sudden stop before a hillside, and headed back to the trees, leaving Tony there with his head spinning. An animal looking something like a cross between a dog and a very sick housecat stuck his head out of a hole in the embankment. Then there was his twin brother, and another, another still, until the hole was filled with about a dozen of those identical ugly animal heads. One of them squirmed out of the hole, came over to Tony, sniffed him, then raised his leg and pissed on him. Then he yipped to his brothers—they all came out and pissed on him, and then they snared his clothes with their teeth and commenced dragging him through the jungle at breakneck speed again.

That entire day Tony was passed in similar ways to the tiger clan, the elephant clan, even the goddamned wildebeest clan, but he wasn
’t kept anywhere longer than a few sniffs and a lot of good peeing. By sunset he was bone-sore and stank to high heaven, and he’d pretty much given up on the idea of becoming intimate with any clever jungle ways.

That
’s when his last potential adoptive jungle family—a ten-yard-wide black mass of no-nonsense army ants—deposited him face first in front of a small jungle dwelling—a jigsaw puzzle of branches, fronds, and mud. Tony shook the jungle debris off him and climbed unsteadily to his feet. A few broken sticks had been stuck to a door crudely fashioned from some salvaged crates. A small bald head appeared in a hole in the hut wall. “Vot iss this?” the head asked him.

Tony looked at the door again with sudden understanding.
The handful of broken sticks formed a swastika.

*

Over the next several weeks Tony was schooled in the clever jungle ways of the expatriated Nazis. They weren’t such bad guys, really, although maybe just a bit intense. They liked injecting him with strange things or feeding him indescribable crap and seeing how he reacted. Mostly he reacted by throwing up.

After a while they let him inject the blacks they kept in a large pen in a nearby jungle clearing.
That wasn’t too bad, kind of interesting really. The stuff he injected the blacks with must have been a lot stronger than the stuff the Nazis used on him because the blacks would scream for a long time after he injected them, roll their eyes and stick their swollen tongues out sometimes until they bit their tongues in two or choked, sometimes both. It was actually kind of funny, sometimes, if they jumped around rubbing their balls or crapping all over themselves, say, or they screamed over and over until it was like this loud, crazy song. Now and then he’d feel a little nervous about being alone in that pen with all those crazy, naked blacks, what with just the hypo to protect him, and what with them knowing what he’d been doing to their buddies. But the Nazis had armed guards just outside the fence carrying these huge tommy guns, and guard dogs with heads the size of watermelons. When the dogs crouched by the fence and growled, showing their long, sword-like teeth, even the bravest of the blacks moved to the center of the compound. Tony figured these dogs were some kind of special Nazi jungle breed—he’d never seen anything like them in any of the pet stores in New Jersey.

He never could figure why the Nazis were injecting the blacks with all that crap, but then he figured it wasn
’t any of his business either. His grandma always told him, “People have their reasons.” That was her other bigtime saying. “Long as nobody got hurt.” Yeah. But blacks don’t count. Even grandma would’ve agreed with that. It was too bad really—Tony
loved
their music. It wasn’t fair, but it was the way it was. It was nature, and half of them living in the jungle like they did, the other half in some filth-hole of a city somewhere, they
had
to know that.