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She oozed unspeakable evil like a ruptured jelly donut on a termite mound in the Congo during the rainy season, but as long as she paid my thirty bucks a day plus expenses, she could be week-old, cheese Danish colonized with blow-fly eggs and kicked under the icebox for all I cared. As a matter of fact, I kind of liked a donut every now and then with my espresso, or a nice flaky, fruit popover hot from the oven. That she had legs that went all the way up to her eyebrows, love handles like pork tenderloins, and a mouth like a hamburger bun didn't hurt too much either. So after our business was concluded, we mated briefly like feral dingoes, bucking desperately against the Hewlett Packard multi-function machine; yowling, yapping and snapping like the damned, three-legged curs of Gomorrah. If either one of us was hoping for some small scrap of comfort to blot out the shit storm of futility and despair called The Sausalito Art Festival -- whose idiot calliopes we heard piping in the distance -- then he or she had hoped wrong. It felt more like I'd been pitchforked into an open grave with drainage and pest control issues, and the lady looked like she felt the same way.
My piggy eyes narrowed in appreciation, and a dirty little simper scurried across my collapsed features like a rodent on a cadaver.
"I could grow to like this," I said over my shoulder, soaping my torpid sex at the grimy sink of my "executive suite." She smirked, spit a thick wad of Juicy Fruit into my demitasse, ground her Macanudo out in the yogurt cup I was looking forward to as a healthy mid-morning snack, tugged down the hem of her nun's habit, and strutted out my office swinging her can like a tetherball in a tornado. The clickety-clack of her high heels on the cracked linoleum echoed like taps for the dead, and I wondered who might have died. Couldn't be me, cupcake, 'cause I'd been dead inside ever since my floppy-eared spaniel, Prince Licorice III, had been run down on a dark, wet night out on Highway 9. A little late for trumpets now. In the chuckling, ghost-filled silence, I whispered hoarsely, "And you have a nice day too, Sister."
Memories of that arthritic, rheumy-eyed, black-as-the-abyss, 18 year-old puppy-dog hit me in the gut like a body shot from an elderly Sly Stallone jacked up on testosterone supplements. How he had loved his nightly gobbet of gristly TV dinner offal. (Licky. Perhaps Mr. Stallone too, I can't say with certainty.) Growling and biting at anyone who approached -- which always reminded me of Granny. Good old Licky, I shall join you one day, my brother, at the council fires of our forefathers, and we shall embrace with great fierceness. But before that joyous reunion, I shall eat the moist, rosy lungs of your murderer; I shall pirouette and flap like a swan around his eviscerated corpse, grunting the ancient songs of our people. Then I'll back over the carcass with the Corolla a few times until I hear the head pop.
I had enough suspects to populate the Republican Congressional Caucus, the Gonzales Justice Department and half the Supreme Court. But I needed proof, Guantanamo-quality proof. And then I could start with the lung-eating. On Licky's behalf. To help come to terms with my loss. A baby step of healing on the path back to innocence...and wholeness.
My body shook with grief and loneliness, and helpless unh unh unh sounds escaped my trembling lips. Then I pulled myself together, blew my nose with gusto and shook off the post-coital melancholy. I sniffed my client's check and considered the dubious bill of goods Ms. Zebub (or Belle as she insisted I call her) had tried to sell me regarding the man -- a monster, she claimed -- she called "The Ancient One" and "Mr. Pepito." Or sometimes just "Pepito." Could he be the one I had also sought these forty years past? I wondered and sniffed and considered. Unfortunately, without thinking, I also took a last swig from my demitasse.
To be continued.
Henry E. Panky
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