John Drues, ex-Cincinnati cop, former lawyer—disbarred before the ink is dry on his license—and now ex-convict, relegated to survival as a repo-man/skip chaser: he couldn’t sink any lower—or could he? Is he now Larry Flynt’s hired assassin, out to snuff the sanctimonious morality merchants who conspired and put Flynt in a wheelchair? Is he in Kentucky stalking a bail jumper, as he claims, or does he have a wire garrote at the ready with a faggoty faith-healing evangelist in his sights?
Jessica Lowery is a Cincinnati newspaper reporter, beautiful, smart, liberated, but only an obit writer with aspirations of a Pulitzer Prize story, a story that could whisk her away to New York where fame and fortune awaits. She’ll meet John Drues head-on when their quests lead them to the backwoods of Kentucky and evil in the unholy CHURCH of Jimmy Foulwell. What dark secret is this godless preacher guarding?
Harold Jenkins slept the sleep of the blissfully ignorant. He had committed nothing to Jessica’s adventurous trek to break into the church vault with that John what’s-his-name, and he was not going to worry one iota about her. Old Harold was not going to stick his neck out for anybody. He wanted nothing more than a good night’s sleep. So, he put the cap back on the Colgate, jumped into his jammies and slid into bed, fast asleep before the first little lamb could be counted. He awoke, however, fully committed to saving his ass.
The first slap did not wake him, but it did ready him for the second. He felt it clear down to his sphincter. His eyes snapped open to the presence of two huge men standing in front of him in a show horse arena. He was tied to a chair with duct tape across his mouth.
“I reckon you’re still alive, huh, picture man?” said the larger of the two men in a slow country drawl, so deep that it sounded like a bass fiddle. “Just so’s you know how ya got here, we took you out of the boardin’ house with chloroform. We coulda killed you right there in your purty little jimmies if we’d a mind to.”
The larger man was a brute, over six feet tall, two hundred and fifty pounds, brown wiry hair, bushed almost into an Afro. His head sort of blended in from an oversized neck. If it weren’t for the bushy hair, he’d be all neck, no head. Harold thought he looked like a smaller version of the wrestler, Andre The Giant, but with a nasty odor and a much uglier face.
The smaller man was smaller by only an inch or two in height and perhaps thirty pounds in weight. He had a gap-toothed grin and one cocked eye with a droopy eyelid. He looked dopy, but happy about it. The man kept playing with his overalls’ buckle at the shoulder. He already had one strap down and looked as if he couldn’t wait to drop the other. Harold took one look at the inbreeds and knew he was in deep hog squishy.
“You one of them Jew-boys?” asked Cockeye, as he walked around the chair eyeballing Harold in the middle of the show ring. “You look like one of them Jews.”
Harold shook his head vigorously and grunted through his nose, “No, no.”
“Now, that ain’t good, kosher cheeks,” Cockeye said. “I bet Cousin Willard here a quart of shine that you was a Jew boy. We coulda been friends, me and you, real good friends”
“He’s a Negro,” Willard said, through a wide, brown-toothed grin, his bass-fiddle voice vibrating the air. “See them big, purty brown eyes.” He fluttered his eyelids as he walked over and stuck his finger in Harold’s nose. “And this here wide nose is fer smellin’ mammy’s chitlin’s and corn pone.
“He ain’t no Negro,” grinned Cockeye, with one eye on Harold and the other scanning the dirt floor. “I’m a Negro, and it takes a darkie to know one. He’s just down here passin’ hisself off as a brother, pissin’ on the plantation, tryin’ to steal our grits.”
Willard scratched his head in mock befuddlement for a moment then turned away and looked upward, pretending to be in deep thought. Suddenly he snapped back around and pressed his face inches from Harold’s. “You a Negro, Mr. picture man?” asked Willard.
Harold frantically weighed his options, which one not to piss-off, big man or smaller man. The big one seemed smarter, but the smaller one was meaner. Smarter won out. He sided with the big man and ‘outted’ himself as a Negro, nodding in the affirmative.
“Now ain’t that sumpthin’. Fiddle-de-dee, I do declare. It just so happens, we hang niggas down here in these parts,” Willard said, lolling his tongue from the corner of his mouth in mock imitation of a hanged man, his hand over his head holding an imaginary rope.
“Yeah, and we corn-hole liars,” guffawed Cockeye, unhooking the other strap to his overalls, dropping them to his ankles and exposing a massive penis. “You gonna like this, you big ole liar, liar ass-hole’s on fire,” he said hefting his member and letting it drop back against his leg with a loud smack.
Harold’s eyes rolled back in his head as he strained against the ropes and began bouncing the chair wildly, trying to move away from the two congenital morons.
“Now, lookie what ye’ve done, Cousin Ezra. He’s worked hisself into a lather, all hot and bothered and such.”
Harold, his eyes bulging, facial veins popping, was trying to speak, but it came out as a loud hum.
“Why, he’s tryin’ to tell us sumpthin,” Willard said in mock amazement, cupping his hand to his ear as he turned his head toward Harold. He bent down and placed his ear next to Harold’s mouth and pretended to interpret Harold’s hum.
“He says he’s one a them Scotch men.” Willard looked up at Cockeye with a burlesqued sincerity. “Says he wears one a them purty little skirts over there in Scotch land.”
“Well, ask him how come they wear them sissy little skirts,” Cockeye said, gap-toothing a big grin, his good eye twitching.
Willard put his ear back to Harold’s taped mouth. “He says they have to wear’em er they’d never get any poon-tang. Says them pesky ole sheep can hear a zipper a mile away.” Cockeye flopped down in the dirt and howled, broke wind so hard he blew up a dust devil.
Willard moved out of sight for a couple of minutes then came back pulling a teaser mare, a fake horse used to collect semen from a stud. They untied Harold, stripped him of his pajamas and hoisted him onto the rear of the mare with his buttocks exposed, then retied his hands with rope beneath the belly of the faux horse.
“Now, we gonna take the tape off your mouth and ask you some questions, and you’re gonna tell us what we want to know. If you lie, cousin Ezra here will know and…well, you know what he does to liars—oh, and if you get gas from layin’ on your belly like that, don’t fart. It gives Ezra a hard-on when he gets a whiff.”
With hysteria rising, Harold told them everything he knew and lots he didn’t, but he included the conversation that was held at the boarding house after John found Cindy Morgan’s body, the plan to break into the vault. He was perfectly willing to start with his first birthday in order not to leave anything out, but Willard had an agenda.
Willard bent low and placed his mouth close to Harold’s ear. “Picture man, you been doin’ very tolerable so far, but you ain’t told us why that John guy is down here with y’all. Now why is that?” asked Willard.
“I swear I don’t know why he’s here. Me and that bitch Jessica came down together, and he was here when we got in.”
“You expect us to believe that cockamammy sheep dip?” asked Willard, stroking the mare’s fake mane.
“I swear on my mother’s grave. It’s the truth, sobbed Harold.”
Willard eye-motioned Cockeye to follow him off to the side, out of earshot, away from Harold. He pulled a pint of shine from his rear pocket, took a long draught and offered the bottle to Cousin Cockeye. Cockeye held up a pouch of Red Man, indicating a pause as he balled a large wad of dark brown tobacco and stuffed it into his cheek. He then took the bottle and swigged down two large gulps, letting the brown mixture dribble from the corners of his mouth and run down his chin as he drank. He lowered the pint and swiped at his mouth with a shirtsleeve already brown-stained from previous napkin duty.
“What do you figure?” whispered Willard.
“I think he’s a lying fart smeller,” said cockeyed Ezra.
“You wanta fuck him to make shore, er do ya wanna kill him?”
“Well, Cousin Julian said we was to make shore he never told nobody about this here. We could kill him, shorenuf, but maybe Cousin Julian didn’t mean fer us to do that, and there goes our hundert dollars. When ye dead, ye can’t lie, ner swear, ner nothin’. If we fuck him, he shore ain’t gonna tell it to nobody.”
Both men smiled and walked back toward Harold; Willard to the front of the horse and cockeyed Ezra to the back. Ezra slapped a half jar of Vaseline into Harold’s crack, spat in a goober of Red Man for good measure, and smacked both butt cheeks.
Harold was on the edge, ready to pass out.
“We had ourselfs one of them summit meetin’s and came to a conclusion,” Willard said. We think you’re a lying Negro, but we ain’t gonna hang ye. Nope, we’re just gonna corn-hole ye to death.
Willard doubled over laughing. He couldn’t stop. He fell to the floor, he-hawing, rolling in the dirt.
Over the edge now, Harold could no longer contain himself. The gas-ball had been building for a half hour, gaining size and velocity with each aborted trip toward freedom. This time it restarted somewhere around Maine, picked up speed in Maryland, was running flat out through Georgia, and by the time it hit his colon, it was a runaway freight train. He broke wind with grandeur, a rafter rattler.
“Now, you’ve gone and done it,” Willard said, finally getting to his feet.
Just as Willard spoke, there came a long, lonesome bray from one of the stalls in the back, a new element that jolted Harold one more time. His nerves ragged and raging, he was craning, about to break his neck, frantically turning this way and that trying to see what was behind him. “Help, somebody help me!” he screamed.
Willard pulled the roll of duct tape from his overalls, ripped off a piece and slapped it over Harold’s mouth.
“You gonna hurt yourself doing that, picture man. Just stop it, now. I told ye not to fart. You’ve woke old Gaylord, our quare donkey back yonder. And when he smells ass, he gets frisky. Now, he wants some too.
Harold’s body went limp. He was out.
Excerpt
Nurse Pendergast didn’t bother to correct Doctor Homer on the twins’ name, nor did she say anything more about the hearing aid. He’d find it himself soon enough. He was almost eighty years old, well past retirement age, and he had both feet planted firmly in la-la-land. When he wasn’t urinating on the cat, he was peeing down someone’s leg or into the potted palm in the waiting room. He had come out of retirement ten years prior to set up the Foulwell Clinic, and somewhere during the interim, when no one was looking, he had shuffled off to Buffalo. He forgot how to get home, and for some vague reason, no one showed him the yellow-brick road.
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