Uschi! (12 page)

Uschi shot right back at her, “Why don’t you use a dog turd for a tampon and shut the fuck up, bitch.” And she kept on keeping on, never pausing for a moment.

Her destination was a trailer house that had in its driveway an early ’80s Chevrolet Impala up on cinderblocks. There were busted bottles and all varieties of trash scattered through the yard’s high grass and weeds. Halloween and Christmas decorations hung all year round off the place.

She walked up to the door, took a moment to check her hair in her reflection in the screen door’s streaked and spotted glass, then knocked. Standing there, waiting, she bounced on the balls of her feet as anxious as a Girl Scout only a few boxes of thin mint sells short from setting a new troop record and winning herself a brand new Schwinn ten speed bicycle. Meeting new people sure was exciting.

The door was answered by the man of the house, Hondo. Hondo looked like the forgotten Allman Brother, chestnut hair past the shoulders long and broom straw straight and parted down the center of his head, with an uncontrolled bushy Jesus beard holding in it dried and crusty portions of last night’s chicken enchiladas dinner. His body odor was all soured dirty laundry and high testosterone.

Leaking from the trailer home were the sounds of a TV set playing noisy cartoons and Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty doing a duet on “Mississippi Woman, Louisiana Man” from a radio tuned to a classic country station.

Hondo stood with the screen door between Uschi and him. He kept his hand inside a bathrobe pocket, gripping a S&W .38. He drank in the image of her, allowing all that watermelon mega boobage and running wild putrescence to be processed through his brain.
Got us something new here, don’t we?
Hondo was an old pro at the dope peddling trade. Crack, heroin, meth, pills, ‘shrooms—he had it all and was happy to provide any of it to anyone for the right price. Hondo’s life was intense and constantly running head-on into the unexpected. A bitch done up like some scary movie dead shit was nothing to loose his cool over.

“Well howdy, Moonshine McJuggs, can I be of help to you and your bigass funbags somehow?”

Uschi twirled a lock of her hair between her fingers. “I sure hope so. I have it on good authority you’re the one in these parts to come and see when you’re looking to buy weed.”

Some soft, snotty laughter came from Hondo. New business, no matter their peculiarities, was always welcomed. He unlocked the screen door and shoved it open enough for Uschi to grab and pull open the rest of the way. “C’mon in here, we’ll get you done right.”

Chapter Seven

D
enny was just awake and still in bed, morning wood stretching the front of his underwear out. He kicked the sheets off of him and looked over at the clock. There was another hour to go before he would need to be at his Blockbuster job. Then he happened to remember his sleeping alone days were over.

Uschi!

He put his hand on her side of the bed. The spot where she had lain last night was empty and cold and ripped in spots where her barbed wiring had caught in the bedsheets.

The smell of fresh-brewed coffee was on the air. Might be that was where she he’d gotten to. He got up, went into the bathroom and did what needed to be done in there, and then made his way to the kitchen.

Sure enough, there Uschi was. She had this morning’s edition of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
spread open on the counter space she was standing at and intensely studying its contents. She was enjoying a cup of coffee along with a dead and maggots-ridden squirrel she was dunking into her cup as if it were a donut. She bit chunks out of the deceased critter and chewed well before swallowing. The curtains above the sink were parted and sharp, bright morning sunlight streamed inside. Dust motes as thick as a swarm of creek bed gnats were visible in the light; Denny watched them lazily waft in the air around her blonde head.

She turned away from the paper and aimed herself his way. “Morning, best thing. Sleep okay?”

He cupped his balls and readjusted himself. “Pretty good.” He was grinning at the sight of her cutoffs and rainbow suspenders ensemble. It was wonderful to be living with a woman with such a bold and outré fashion sense. “How about you? Did you have a good night?”

“I had a great night.”

Denny saw that there was a live maggot trapped between her two front teeth, squirming and struggling to escape. Politely as he could he pointed this out to Uschi, and she used a fingernail tip to work the worm free. It dropped on her tongue and she promptly swallowed it whole as if it were nothing less than a morning vitamin pill.

“Where’d the newspaper come from?” he asked as he was at the coffee maker and filling his cup.

“Oh, same place where I got the squirrel—stole it out of one of our neighbor’s front yards.”

A touch of a concerned shrill screech worked its way into Denny’s voice. “You were outside?”

“There was this errand I had to run.”

“People saw you?”

“Sure. I met some folks. Did some talking with a few. What can I say? I’m a people person. I have a friendly nature about myself.”

“Oh jack me off with salad tongs. And how did people seem to react when they saw you?”

“Pretty cool. Oh sure a few assholes stared and one Bible belt cunt with a face that if ugly knew the way of the samurai hers would qualify as deadly as a Shogun’s personal decapitator tried to shame me in how I was dressed. But other than that nobody seemed to be too upset about me being on the scene. I know where you’re going with this.”

“You do?”

Uschi finished the last of her squirrel and chased it down with a sip of coffee. Her eyes were half-lidded as her lips touched the cup and the rising steam from the hot beverage washed over her cemetery’s best face. The muscles in her throat were rippling just beneath the flesh as she swallowed. The lipstick imprint she left behind on the cup’s brim as juicy red as a wound after the scab’s been peeled back.

“I don’t look like what passes for normal,” she said, “and you’re worried I’ll frighten the community and make them panic and cause problems for yourself. You’d rather try and avoid any modern day pitchfork and torches
Frankenstein
confrontations with the townsfolk. I get you. It’s a valid concern, I’ll grant you. But I wouldn’t get too worked up over it. I’m really not as far out of the norm as you fear. Seriously, slow down, let your common sense get into gear and put some thought to it. Do I really seem that much more different than the last orange hair and dog collar wearing punk rock teen in the ‘Who Farted?’ T-shirt you saw with their mom and dad at The Olive Garden? The freaky, the offensive, and the generally fucked up blend surprisingly well with the American culture of today. I’m just another contribution to that great melting pot. The worst we’ll ever get from people is impolite stares and a sizeable distance kept between us and them.”

A charcoal black liquid substance that the human body surely did not typically produce began to drizzle from her nose. Denny watched the fluid drip off her upper lip and assumed it was the result of the hot steam from the coffee floating up into her nasal passageways and loosening something up in there.

She might be reaching with that blending in with the other weirdoes theory of hers. But he loved her, so he decided to play it charitable. “Okay. You might be on to something. What exactly kind of errand did you have to run?”

“Aw, I needed to go and get us some marijuana.”

From a back pocket Uschi produced a plastic baggie full of pot. She tossed it down on the counter. Denny recoiled from the sight of it as if it were a deadly scorpion. A child of the ’80s, he had always obeyed First Lady Nancy Reagan. He just said no.

“I assure you, best thing; I purchased it only for pure medicinal reasons. That shit will do you a world of good. That’ll relax you and your adorable ass in ways you thought you could never be relaxed.”

Denny stared at the bag of dope like it was cat vomit smeared on top of a graham cracker. “Where did you get that?”

“Over at Hondo’s place.”

Hondo. Oh yeah, Denny knew about him and what went on at his place. He always made sure to avoid Hondo and the people that were always coming and going from that trailer house.

“Honey,” he told her levelly, “that’s a crack house. You went crack house visiting. Sweet monkey motherfuckers.”

“Sure, it is a crack house, but that don’t stop it from being a lovely home full of nothing but wonderful individuals. Take Margo, Hondo’s wife, a charming dear only another month away from earning her trade school diploma in air-conditioning repair. I thought that was a pretty impressive achievement, especially considering how she’s a hardcore crystal meth tweaker. You would like her, best thing. She has a tattoo of Thundarr the Barbarian on her arm and Ookla the Mok high on her inner thigh. Thundarr’s her favorite Saturday morning cartoon hero. I asked her about Princess Ariel, and Margo told me she didn’t give a fuck about that bitch. How can you not like a woman like that?”

“I like Princess Ariel.” He mumbled that into his cup of coffee the second before he took a drink.

“And Hondo’s prices were quite reasonable.”

“Speaking of that, where’d you get the money for this?”

“I helped myself to what you had stashed away in the old Popsicle box up there in the freezer.”

“Oh. You know about that. Did you spend all of it?”

“The fair majority.”

Denny’s voice fell flat and the words were delivered with the same get up and go cheerleader spirit as an impulsive decision to do the colored clothes before the whites on laundry day. “Damn. And I was saving that money to buy a DVD player. Now I’ll never get to hear John Carpenter and Kurt Russell’s commentary track for
Big Trouble in Little China
.”

Uschi washed her cup out under the tap and left it to air dry in the dish rack. “And you’ve quit your job.”

“Man, this morning just keeps getting better and better. No more Blockbuster gig, huh? And how did you manage that to come about?”

“Glad you asked. Before I went to purchase grass, I made a phone call to your boss. I told him I was your girlfriend and about as politely as I could phrase it informed him in an articulate and precise manner that you were done working for him. Actually, to be wholly truthful with you, I wasn’t exactly all polite with him in our conversation. The, uh, words fuckface and diseased douchebag and horseshit-for-brains popped up surprisingly frequent in the productive time together we shared. There might also have been made references to his mother and wife a time or two. They were heat of the moment type of things that just jumped from my mouth before I could stop myself. Things such as how I was frightfully confident Momma enjoyed giving blowjobs to farm animals and the dear old wife had a certain interest in brushing her teeth with the runny diaherra from the poorly kept sanitary assholes of circus clowns. Needless to say, best thing, don’t expect a letter of recommendation from the guy.”

Denny wondered what a heartattack might feel like. Because right that moment, with Uschi’s calm explanation still ringing in his ears, he began to experience a sudden tightness in his chest and a difficulty breathing fine and a sense of numbness in a few of his extremities.

He didn’t have a job. But those bills were going to keep coming in and needing to be paid. The groceries had to be bought. What were they going to do? How were they going to get by? The Republicans were in power, which meant the economy was shit and jobs were mucho scarce.

“Uschi … oh, Uschi … love of my life Uschi … why on earth would you do something like get me fired from my job?”

“You don’t need a job anymore. You are free, you big swinging dick. Time to start doing only what you want to do. Other people need employment and responsibilities. Not us. We’re renegades. Free and wild and gonna fuck around with whatever we might want to fuck around with.”

“I can’t do this. You just can’t do this to me. I can’t let you take control of my life like this. This is getting way too Kelly LeBrock and Anthony Michael Hall in
Weird Science
on me. I hate that movie—no nudity and Vernon Wells doesn’t have enough screen time. Uschi, you’re not here to try and make me better somehow. You’re here for me to fuck, suck and fondle however I want whenever I want. Forgive me for being so blunt, but it really needs to be told to you like it is.”

When Denny Gleeth was done he gave himself mental congratulations for keeping the whining down as he spoke.

For that little speech Uschi gave Denny a hug and a pat on the ass. “That’s cute,” she said. “You’re trying to take charge. Best thing, sweet lover of mine, you’re not ready to be bossy like that. But give it time. When I’m done getting you in shape, you’ll give commands stern enough to make Superman’s Kryptonian asshole pucker. In the meanwhile, keep it Mark Hamill in
Corvette Summer
cool and go with the flow I set for us.”

He put his face in his hands. Not a good morning. He wanted to hurt. He was yearning to burn himself numerous times with a cigarette lighter.

“You’ll see, best thing, I’m doing us nothing but positives. At Blockbuster you were forced to live your life in the pan and scan format, but from now on it’s going to be nothing but widescreen letterbox. Doesn’t that sound like a winner? Huh? What do you say, sweetness? You gonna talk to me?”

Uschi tickled him along the ribs, and Denny slapped her hands aside and took a step back from her. Now he was pissed. Bad enough she cost him his job, stole his DVD player money, was without his permission socializing with known drug addicts and criminals, and now she wanted to tease him like he was he was a five-year-old. He tried staring hard into her face, putting his anger and disgust with her all out there showing in his expression.

Uschi initiated a plan to change his attitude. She undid her cutoff shorts and exposed for him her privates. She placed fingers on opposite sides of her vagina and manipulated the labia like it was a vertical puppet’s mouth. “Hi, this is Patty the pussy reminding you,” she said in a silly Deputy Dog cartoon voice. “Get your head out of your ass and wipe that shit right the fucking hell out of your eyes and start enjoying life to its fullest, you motherfucker.”