Uschi! (20 page)

“Poppycock. I will be with you, best thing, every step of the way. And I’m the best protection you could ever hope to have. I would sooner have a breast reduction surgery and give up eating people than see any harm come to you. We will have sexy fun and ass puckering adventure and lots and lots of lovely murdering. It’s going to be positively grand. The human adventure is only just beginning.”

Chapter Fifteen

T
he Get It Quick convenience store was inside the boundaries of the Mapache Thicket. This was the country, with mostly open pastureland and grazing livestock for company on this lonely part of two-lane road. The establishment came equipped with four self-serve gas pumps—unleaded, super unleaded, premium unleaded and diesel—and this was one of those godawful businesses where you had to come inside and pay before you could begin to fill your tank. Except for the metal doorframe, the entire front of the store was glass, and lit up glowing neon beer signs occupied nearly every available inch of space like electrified graffiti. Small but well stocked, the inside of the Get It Quick featured everything from brake fluid to tunafish, dishwasher detergent to ladies sanitary napkins. A large metal sign bolted to the front of the cashier stand in back of the place informed in both English and Spanish THE CASHIER DOES NOT KNOW THE COMBINATION TO THE STORE SAFE. The smells of lottery ticket ink and microwaved burritos forever dominated the atmosphere in here.

The lone employee working there tonight was sitting on a bar stool behind the counter, wasting time and life span on a fat girls porno magazine he was “borrowing” from the adult reading material newsstand with him behind the counter.

This was Gator. His eyes were bland and vacuous like a ventriloquist dummy’s and his hair he kept cut short and shaped in a Moe Howard chili bowl haircut. In the back pocket of Gator’s dark slacks was his price labeling gun, and the feel of it pressing against his left ass cheek continuously kept reminding him there was work to be doing around these parts. There was a corner aisle display of canned dog food that required a ten-cent mark up. Yes, he knew he best be getting on it, but Gator was just in too much of a lazy mood right then and there to snap into high flying dog food pricing action.

A small thirteen-inch TV set was sitting on the counter, in close proximity to the cash register, and it was showing an old, old
Barnaby Jones
episode. Special guest-star William Shatner was the obvious fiendish killer, so that left Gator with marginal if any interest in the program.

Soon he could hear the racket made by a weird sounding engine. A weak, bad carburetor putt-putt-putting. It was too small for an automobile or motorcycle. More suited for a go-cart or a kid’s moped. Gator took his eyeballs away from a particularly graphic full-page spread of a three-hundred sixty pounds Nebraska farm girl who was more than happy to give the world an especially up close and personal examination of her hairy like a cat’s belly where babies come from and sat up straight on the barstool. He turned down the volume on the television. The weird engine sounds were steadily growing closer.

He came off the stool. A powerful curiosity had taken hold of him. What was this all about? He approached the storefront, looking outside. He watched as a going at it in third gear riding lawn mower, its twin headlights doing puny little to cut through the evening’s darkness and the disengaged mower deck raised maybe at best six inches off the road, pulled into the Get It Quick’s parking lot and stopped beside the gas pumps.

It was a Murray brand mower, dirty and its paint job sun-faded, driven by a woman trying to work the wheel while balancing a small child perched on her lap.

After a brief hunt, she found the key and switched off the engine. She hadn’t considered throttling down and there was a backfire as loud as a shotgun blast. Both her and the kid jumped and wailed and had a short crying fit over that. Some effort and figuring things through, but in time they disembarked safely enough. They held hands as they walked together to the store.

The woman wore a man’s western cut shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and a down to the ankles pioneer dress skirt that did nothing to complement the shape of her ass. The child was a little boy in Spider-Man pajamas and a Dallas Cowboys football helmet that swallowed his head whole and wobbled on top of him like the dome on a bobble head doll.

By the time the door was opening, Gator was back comfortably on his stool seat. He put the dirty fat girls periodical away under the counter. “Well howdy.” He smiled at the two of them and watched as they were approaching the counter. “Good to have y’all come in. I was hoping for some company to come around for a while now. Tell me how I can help y’all tonight.”

The woman’s hair was long and straight and dark and parted down the center in a beatnik coffeehouse poet girl style. She had recently been on the receiving end of a brutal beating. She looked just godawful. A considerable fat lip to her mouth and a turnip purple bruising had swollen her left eye shut; red welts of differing sizes pocked her forehead and much of her face. Only recently had she stopped bleeding from her nose, the red stuff dried and crusty around her nostrils and staining the front of her shirt. There was a tangible sadness about her that filled the immediate air surrounding her. She seemed frightened, insecure and terribly fragile right this moment. Gator imagined that if he were to only breathe on her too hard she’d snap in two like a Popsicle stick.

It took a spell before she could muster up the initiative to speak to him. “Sir, did you see what we drove up in?” Her voice was sounding rough, strained and small. “The lawn mower?”

“Uh, yeah, missy, I did happen to notice that.”

“Its gauge is sitting on the E. I don’t know much about these kinds of machines. Do you by any chance happen to know how much gas it holds?”

“Oh, I’d imagine three or four gallons worth. Give or take a share.”

She opened her purse, produced a pair of fives, and slid them over the counter to Gator. Her painted fingernails were green like pistachio almond ice cream. “That’s enough to get me a full tank, yes?”

“We’ll let it make do, sure.”

The boy was leaning his little head back a far ways so he could look out of the big football helmet and up at Gator. Behind the facemask was a grin on his mudpie plain face that was one those so ugly it was kind of cute jobs. “We’re adventure driving,” he informed in a breathy, high-pitched voice.

“Y’all are? And what exactly is all that about?”

She answered that. “Here we are on a lawn mower with a dang near empty gas tank, we got for company them giant dump trucks hauling gravel and trash that travel this road at like a hundred miles an hour roaring past us every other minute, and it’s all happening in the pitch black middle of the night. Lord, if you can’t call that adventure driving, then I don’t know what you could.”

Gator chuckled. “I hear you on that.”

“I’m thirsty, Momma. Can I have a soda pop?”

“I tell you what, I’m thirsty myself. How about you go and fetch us a Big Red and the two of us will share it.”

“Okey-doke.” And he did his best little military salute, his hand going
thock
when it bounced off the side of the Cowboys helmet, and then he was off in a hurry to the soft drinks cooler.

With her little boy out of earshot, the woman next told Gator, “I’ve left my husband. I promised him I would if he was ever to come at me drunk and fists doubled up again.” She said that without an ounce of shame or reservations concerning sharing this information with a complete stranger. A convenience store clerk was a lot like a bartender that way—people always eager to come along and spill their life’s story to them. “Tonight he decided to one more time take his frustration with how he thinks the world treats him so shitty out on my face. That’s it. I’m done. I’m all out of forgiveness.”

This quiet pall then happened between the two of them. It was awkward and uncomfortable. Gator didn’t rightly know the proper way to respond to something like this. Finally, he went with what first came to his mind.

“Why a getaway on a mower?”

“When my husband’s arms got tired and there was no more beer in the house, he cut out to his favorite bar in the one car we got. My mind was made up. I wasn’t going to spend another night in that house no matter what. I promised I’d leave him and I am come hell or high water determined to hold myself to it. I woke my baby and fetched my purse and we hightailed it out of there on the only means of transportation available to us.”

“I see. Makes sense.”

“Now, I may not look it to you,” she continued, “but I do actually have this thought out. Well, mostly thought out. I got a friend, and she doesn’t live too far off from these whereabouts. She should be willing to put us up for at least one night. From there I can make arrangements to skeedaddle out of state. I have family in Arkansas. They’re good people. They’ll help; they’ll look out for us. I’ll get me a divorce and start fresh. We’re gonna do okay. Just need some gas, then we’ll be set to rock ’n roll.”

The boy returned to the counter, bottle of Big Red in his hands. His mother handed it over to Gator and he rang it and the gas up together on the register. He bagged the Big Red and gave it back to the boy before reaching under the counter and switching on the pump.

“You ever pumped gas before?” he asked.

This big sigh came from the beaten mother. “Nope. This is about to be my first time at it.”

“Tell you what, let me walk out there with y’all and show you how it’s done.”

“I don’t want to put you out any.”

“Aw, you ain’t putting me out. Don’t worry any about that. In fact, I appreciate the something to do. I’ve been too complacent around these parts lately. This gives me the chance to shake off the cobwebs.”

All good country boy charm and manners, Gator came around the counter’s corner and began heading down one of the Get It Quick’s shopping aisles. “I’d hate for y’all to get out there and get stuck with a problem and have nobody close by to help you.” He stopped beside the pyramidal display of canned dog food he needed to reprice, turned around and waited while they fell in step and started to follow him. “The three of us working together ought to get it done right.”

She was smiling and ignoring the pain this brought to her abused face. “It’s really kind of you to do this.” She looked at her son and gave him a slight nudge along the shoulder. “What do we say to the nice man?”

“Thank you.”

“Just trying to satisfy my customers.”

One of those cans of dog food then all of a sudden found its way off the display and into Gator’s hand. It was a 13OZ. can, thick and heavy and its contents a mixed chicken and rice recipe that guaranteed right there on the label to help give your pet’s coat a healthy, shiny luster. When, hand in hand with her child, she stepped in reach of the kind convenience store clerk, Gator whacked her as viscously hard as he could upside the head with the can.

There was this short but memorable dense
kunk!
of a sound that visited every corner of the Get It Quick.

The woman screamed once and collapsed. She hit a shelf and did a rattling good job of knocking over cans of condensed milk and chopped black olives before lying in a fleshy heap on the floor. A split in her scalp started to bleed, quickly painting one half of her face red. She remained conscious, but deeply pain shocked and unresponsive to all around her. The hold on her son’s hand slipped away and was lost. They would never touch one another again.

“MOMMA!” screamed the boy.

There’s something special about a child’s scream. Like no other sound imaginable. It was impossible not to have an ounce of humanity somewhere lurking inside you and not be affected by it. Not wanting to immediately forget all else and reach out and do something to help.

Gator put a swift kick to the kid’s belly. That shut him up and left him thrashing on the floor next to his mother. Then, nonchalant as lifting the lid on a commode, he put his fingers through the slots in the facemask’s grill and removed the helmet from the boy’s head. His expression quite neutral, he raised the helmet and brought it down like a medieval executioner’s axe, fast and savagely on the crown of the young customer’s skull. It was a killing blow. The blood that flowed from the boy’s head wound was enough for a Brian De Palma movie, and merged together with his mother’s own spilled blood and collected in a large pool around the both of them.

A silent Gator behaved like a caveman in love and dragged the woman by her hair along the floor and deposited her at the doors to the beer and wine cooler. She tried to move in an attempt to sit up. It was not the smartest thing she could have done right then, what with Gator standing over her and watching with a detached cold stare as she struggled to rise. Another solid
kunk!
from the can of dog food ended those shenanigans.

The beer and wine cooler’s six doors were glass; five metal frame shelves behind each door, and the variety of alcoholic beverages it appeared stocked with vast and plentiful. Gator opened one of its doors and pushed back and to the side the shelf rack. It was on wheels and moved smoothly and with not too much effort required. Bottles and cans softly rattled and clacked together.

There were no lights on inside, only impenetrable blackness. It would seem logical to anticipate an icy blast of air to strike as the door opened, something just above freezing and sure to put gooseflesh on exposed skin. That didn’t happen with this cooler. Instead the air that wafted out was a tropical climate, dank and warm, with an earthy and ripe vegetation stench about it.

Under half a dozen tentacle-like appendages with brown bark scaled skin and covered in green leaves squirmed and slithered from out of the cooler and coiled around the woman’s limp form. She was effortless and silently but for the occasional leaves rustling together lifted off the floor and carried inside the cooler.

Gator fetched the boy, dragging him by one leg back to the cooler. More sinuous vegetable matter reached for the dead kid and took him. Very soon there were eating sounds, noisy and gurgling sucking like a straw hitting the empty bottom of a strawberry milkshake.