’Course, that still didn’t mean they knew he was involved. If he was careful, he might go undetected.
Bill crawled up to the other side of the creek and peeked through the thin line of trees there, saw something that surprised him.
PART TWO
Frost
Six
There was a huge pasture and the grass was cut way short and summer-burned to the color of a saltine cracker, and Bill knew if he stepped on it the grass would crackle like corn flakes. Parked on the pasture were a number of caravan-style trucks and silver trailers with brightly painted sides hooked up to semi-cabs, and there was an old station wagon and a motor home.
The trailers had pictures of weird people, wild animals, and snakes painted on them, and blazed across one in red paint was
ODDITIES OF THE WORLD.
There was one shiny silver trailer off to the right, away from the others, as if placed there on special assignment. Painted on its side in black and blue was a stocky, bearded wild man encased in a block of ice. The man was blue-skinned with black hair and the ice block was a lighter blue. Above this were the words ICE MAN written out as if in icicles.
There were a handful of people moving amongst the trailers and trucks, and even from a distance Bill could tell they were not normal folk. One was a tall lean pinheaded man in overalls and another was a woman with a beard and a green dress with some kind of dark pattern on it.
There were a number of others that Bill could not see well, and could only think of as being in various states of ugly. One actually ran on all fours, and had a spine bent like a horseshoe. A midget in a porkpie hat stood next to the bearded lady, as if ready to crawl under her dress and hide.
Bill settled down in the creek bed and looked at the dead deputy and wondered what he should do. He was surprised at how tired he was. The creek bed was cool and there was an indentation in it and the dirt was soft and damp, and without really realizing it, Bill made himself comfortable, and soon was asleep.
When Bill awoke he was famished and thirsty and none of it had been a dream. It was growing late and the sunlight had lessened, though it would be light until nine o’clock or so. Bill wondered what time it was. He went over to the deputy and checked to see if the deputy had a watch. He did.
Bill picked up the deputy’s arm and pulled it out of the water and looked at the watch on the corpse’s wrist. The watch was obviously waterproof. The second hand ticked away, and the time read seven forty-six.
Well I’ll be screwed and tattooed, thought Bill, I’ve slept for hours.
Bill dropped the deputy’s wrist, waded upstream away from the flow of blood from the deputy’s head – which had stopped, but the idea of it still bothered him – and dipped his hand in the water and scooped out a drink. The water felt good and tasted sweet at first, but soon it made his stomach hurt.
He decided he had to find food, no matter what. It was just the sort of thing that would make him fuck up, being this hungry. He had to have something to eat, even if he had to show himself to a bunch of freaks.
Bill came out of the creek and climbed over the bank and walked toward the caravan. There weren’t as many freaks as before, but he could see the guy who ran on all fours, and two that he had not seen earlier. They both appeared to have heads about the size and shape, if not the color, of jack-o’-lanterns. They were tossing a Frisbee back and forth, and the dog-man was running between them, leaping up, trying to grab the thing in his mouth. The meat heads laughed and the dog-man made a crude noise and kept at it.
Bill staggered in their direction. It was slightly warmer away from the riverbank, and Bill could see the late evening sun hanging low in the sky like a cracked fertile egg, leaking gold and yellow and blood-red chicken all over the horizon, seeping through the trees.
Scissortails darted across the sky in search of bugs, and Bill could hear cars out on the highway beyond, buzzing happily along with no concerns for lost heist money, wet Roman candles, dead deputies, or melting mothers in black plastic bags.
As Bill neared the trailers the meat heads ceased their game, paused to look at him. The dog-man didn’t seem to notice, and when one of the freaks lowered the Frisbee to his side, the dog-man snatched it from his hand with his mouth, ran in a circle and leaped and came down and saw Bill walking toward him. The Frisbee dropped from the dog-man’s mouth and he pushed his head in Bill’s direction, as if trying to recognize someone familiar. Bill got the impression the man might even be sniffing the air, but he was too far away to be certain.
As he grew nearer, the dog-man began to hop up and down like a mechanical pup, then bounded away in the direction of one of the trailers.
Bill didn’t realize it right off, but as he neared the freaks, he discovered he had both of his hands extended, palm up, beggar position. He was so hungry and so tired, so in need of anything and everything, he couldn’t help himself. He fell down twice, and pretty soon the freaks with the big heads had him under each arm and were half carrying, half dragging him toward the trailers.
Perhaps, he thought, I am an alien abductee, and a moment from now they’ll have me on a cold table with salad tongs spreading my butt cheeks and a cold wet alien finger up my ass. You hear about alien abductions, the asshole is always a prime target. And they liked to jack people off for sperm. He thought he could handle that part better than the finger up the ass. It might even be kind of restful.
When they were a few feet from the trailers, the dog-man and a large fiftyish man with thick snow white hair and eyebrows housing a couple of renegade black hairs appeared.
The man wore a nice white suit, a white and yellow checkered vest, a pearl white shirt, and a bow tie that was checked to match the vest. He had on shiny white shoes and thin white socks which were visible because the pants were a smidgen too short. Little white hairs poked through the thin socks. He looked at Bill in a quizzical manner, turning his head this way and that.
The dog-man was still bouncing, and now that he was close up, Bill could see that he was wearing gray coveralls. He had a dark elongated face that looked all the world like a dog snout, and beneath the snout there was a well-tended pencil-thin mustache. His ears had hair growing out of them, and his back legs ended in pithy nubs encased in leather bags drawn tight around his ankles. His hands were flat against the ground, and around the palm area he had wrapped some sort of padding.
The dog-man sat back on his haunches and kept repeating something over and over that Bill couldn’t quite make out because the dog-man spoke as if he might have a biscuit lodged in his throat.
Weak from hunger, Bill felt himself collapsing between the arms of the bulb heads, and pretty soon he lay on his back and the sky whirled blue and gray with orange at the fringes. The bulb heads bent over him.
He heard someone say, “Give him air,” and the bulb heads moved away. The face of the snow-headed man moved into his line of sight, and the man bent over him, and he felt the man’s hands at his chest, unbuttoning his shirt. He began to breathe better. He rolled his head to the side and smelled the drying grass, and from that angle he could see the last of the sunlight hanging between the trees, as if a giant with an inflamed hemorrhoid was mooning him.
The dog-man was repeating himself over and over, and finally Bill realized what it was he was saying.
“One of us. One of us. One of us.”
Seven
Bill had a fuse in his dick and it was being lit by the deputy. As the fuse burned down, taking his dick with it, nearing his balls, he knew there was going to be an explosion, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.
He just lay on his back on a little spit of land out in the middle of the swamp swarming with water moccasins, and couldn’t move. The deputy, whose jaw was hanging by a stringy strand of flesh, sat on a cypress stump and looked at Bill and moved what was left of his mouth. He couldn’t make a sound, but Bill knew he was saying, over and over, “Cocksucker. Cocksucker. Cocksucker.”
Bill tried to lift his hands to put out the fuse, but nothing happened. He was confused by this. He had lifted his hands often enough, and had certainly pulled his johnson under some pretty difficult circumstances (such as trying to concentrate while the smell of his dead mother floated into his bedroom from next door and stuck up in his nostrils thick as dirty cotton wads), but now, he couldn’t do a thing with his thing. The fuse was almost to his balls, and when it went, well, it was going to blow him all to hell and back, and it wasn’t going to do his nuts any good either.
He thought maybe he ought to let it burn down and go. Here he was, all worn out on an isle in a swamp surrounded by water moccasins, a dead deputy dripping his jaw on a stump nearby, and his dick burning away as he lay helpless on his back, so maybe he ought to just lie here and close his eyes and let it all go, blow him out of this life and into nothingness. What was the point of going on?
He lay there committed to doom, waiting to blow, then decided he couldn’t do that. Couldn’t just lie back and explode into nothingness. He felt stronger suddenly, reached for his dick, found it under a sheet, then heard, “One of us,” and opened his eyes.
“No, Conrad,” said the white-haired man. “I don’t think so. I think he’s some kind of accident.”
Bill considered this but couldn’t figure what the man meant by that. He was lying on a bed, naked under a sheet, holding himself, and the white-haired man was reaching over to lift his head with one hand and place a cup of water to his lips with the other.
Bill looked up into the white-haired man’s face. The face was somewhat fleshy and pink and the eyes were so blue they looked almost purple. The lips were pale, and there was a hint of white stubble on his upper lip and chin. There was a bright light behind the man’s head, and it shined through his pale hair and around his head and looked like a halo.
Bill drank.
The dog-man, Conrad, was nearby, almost even with the edge of the bed, snuffling near the old man’s elbow. Conrad lifted his head and poked it close to Bill’s face. Bill rolled his head toward Conrad’s strange snout and pulsating nostrils. He could see the neatly trimmed mustache, under the dog-man’s nose like a trained caterpillar. He was so tired he didn’t really feel surprised, disgusted, or amused. He didn’t feel much of anything.
The dog-man changed his snuffling from the old man’s elbow to Bill’s face. “One of us,” the dog-man said defiantly.
“Have it your way,” said the white-haired man, lowering the cup, then lowering Bill’s head onto the pillow. “How are you, son?”
Bill couldn’t speak. His tongue seemed too full in his mouth. He nodded.
“Can you sign?” said the white-haired man. “I can read sign.”
Bill shook his head.
Another face appeared. A young woman with short blond hair and a face sugary as a confection. She had a cute freckled nose, lips so red they looked as if they had been colored by a cherry snow cone. She was bouncy. She bent over him and he could smell her, and she smelled like fresh cut hay and wet sex and a dab of men’s cologne and a sheen of healthy sweat. Her eyes were almost black and he could see himself in them.
She was wearing a man’s white strap T-shirt and her round breasts swung inside it like two sweet melons in a cotton sack. She had a puzzled look on her face as she examined him.
“I think Conrad’s right,” she said. “I think he’s one of them. I betcha too, way he’s all hunched up there, he’s playin’ with his pecker.”
Bill let go of his dick and carefully slid his hand down by his side. The girl stood up and Bill rolled his head slightly. His eyes came to rest on her belly. The T-shirt did not extend that far, and her little belly button, which he noted was an outtie, not an innie, was exposed, as if inviting him to suck it. It had a ring through it and on the ring was a little jewel the color of blood.
She had on faded blue jean shorts with very little jean or shorts to them. Her legs, like the rest of her body, were smooth and tanned. She was not very tall, but at least two thirds of her appeared to be legs. The shorts fit her tight in the crotch and her pussy looked as if it might be working the zipper from the inside.
Hair fanned out from the top of the shorts, which were unbuttoned and curled open and held in place by the zipper alone. The hair thinned as it crawled up her belly and into the belly button. The hair that escaped from the shorts was darker than the hair of her head, reddish, as if formerly blond but dyed with blood, or perhaps a hint of rust.
“Just another one of your strays,” said the girl.
The white-haired man looked at the woman and frowned. He turned his attention back to Bill, said, “It’s all right, son, don’t pay her no mind.”
Bill managed to weakly shake his head.
The old man said, “I had to dispose of your clothes. They were quite soiled. But we have some that will fit you. Right now, you need rest.”
“You’re nothing but a sucker, Frost,” Bill heard the girl’s voice say.
“Yes,” he answered, “I lack your Darwinistic view, I suppose.”
“Hah!” the girl said.
Bill tried to speak again, but still couldn’t. His tongue was like a dry sponge. The old man smiled at him and made a kind of face that told him everything was okay.
Bill stared into the white-haired man’s face for a long moment, then turned in search of the blonde’s belly button, and found it. He kept sight of it and the red jewel in it as long as was possible, then closed his eyes.
He fell asleep almost immediately. He didn’t dream of a fuse this time. He didn’t dream of the deputy with the blown-away jaw. He didn’t dream of an isle in a swamp or water moccasins either.
He dreamed of laying the blonde on her back and licking her belly button, lathering up the hair below it, pulling down that zipper. From there the dream really got good.