Grundish & Askew (16 page)

•  •  •

Before Askew could comprehend what was happening, he found himself playing the role of the bad dog getting his nose rubbed in another turd on the floor of life. When it was all over, and the smoke cleared from the barrel of the blunderbuss, when the blood had already begun to coagulate on the wall, when the only sound was the ringing in his ears, Askew stepped back and took account of what he had done and saw that it amounted to something very bad.

“Shit,” Askew mumbles with no trace of emotion. “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Fuck. Shit. Fuck.” In front of him, crumpled on the floor, is the husk of the man known as Randy Buttwynn, with a hole in his body where his life had been. On the wall behind his remains, a chunky Rorschach splotch of gore, blood, and gristle presents a pattern that to some might look like a goat’s head and to others the female reproductive system. To Askew it looks like trouble.

Dangling from Askew’s hand is the still-warm blunderbuss. Around his ankles is a pair of Buttwynn’s silk boxers. His dick hangs limply between his legs. After the long talk with Grundish the night before, after Grundish started heaving up his dinner and passed out on the bathroom floor, after Askew ran about the house seeking petty revenge on Buttwynn’s belongings, after checking in on the kid in the guest bedroom, after tolerating the inexplicable, painful and insistent erection for hours, Askew sat down alone in the theater room and put a blanket over his lap in case Turleen should walk in on him. With the blunderbuss on the chair at his side and remote control in hand, Askew searched the adult channels on the television until he found a promising movie entitled
Ouch! That’s My Asshole
!, to which he unsuccessfully and repeatedly attempted to rid himself of the aching stiffness in his loins. He wondered how he could keep such a strong erection for four hours.

•  •  •

Askew was right about Randy Buttwynn. He is a Fucker. After spending part of the planned vacation with his family in Wisconsin, Buttwynn claimed to have a work emergency that required him to return home early. “Oh no,” he told his wife and children, “I don’t want to ruin everybody’s trip. You all need to stay here and take advantage of the time with Grandma. I’ll be okay. It breaks my heart to have to leave you guys halfway through our only vacation this year. My boss just won’t budge on this, though. He insists that I’m at the meeting tomorrow.” Kissing his wife and children and wiping a tear from his eye, Randy Buttwynn walked out on his family so that he could have several days free of them to spend instead with Dora, his part-time whore.

When Randy Buttwynn would think about the things he would do to Dora, the things she let him do because he paid her, it excited him to the point of frustration. Even the fact that he paid her made him excited. Dora, a rail-thin kid, met Buttwynn as a customer at the Scrub-N-Rub massage parlor where she worked in Tampa. A quick handjob and a courtesy rubbing of the nubs where her tits should be was enough to make Buttwynn become obsessed with her. All he could think about was the eighteen-year-old girl with crooked teeth who looked to him like she was thirteen. And the thought of fucking a girl that looked the same age as the cute little friends his daughter brought home made him hot. Really hot. So Buttwynn regularly met with Dora at the Crosstown Inn and paid her the money he was supposed to be setting aside for the Buttwynn children’s college funds. The wide-bored nostrils on his upturned porcine nose flared and contracted as he fantasized about her. His tiny teeth had a funny way of sitting in his swollen pink gums, and he sucked at them nervously, making a wet clicking sound whenever he would think of the things he would do to her. In the airplane seat beside Buttwynn, an older woman—one with bluish-gray hair and the menthol aroma of a topical pain reliever—was disturbed by the odd teeth sucking and subtle hip thrusts of Buttwynn. The woman moved seats and later told her husband that there was something about the man in the seat next to her that made her skin crawl. Something in his strange mannerisms reeked of perversion, something rotten just below the surface.

Cheating on his wife thrilled Buttwynn. And with her gone in Wisconsin, the biggest rush would be to have his way with Dora in the bed he and his wife shared every night. Mister and Missus rarely had sex, and when they did it was merely for the purpose of procreation. There was nothing exciting to Randy Buttwynn about turning the lights off and fucking his homely wife through a hole in a sheet that covered the rest of her body. That’s what she insisted on – a hole in a sheet with just her bushy slit exposed. With the family gone, Buttwynn saw the opportunity of a lifetime to show the marriage bed what was really supposed to happen between a man and a woman. Thoughts of filling Dora’s various orificial openings with body parts and inanimate objects consumed Buttwynn as he parked his car in the driveway and briskly ushered her through the front door of his house. Greeting the couple was the welcoming fragrance of meatloaf and freshly baked bread.

“What the dickens is going on?” says Buttwynn to his lady friend, his nostrils flaring and twitching like an annoyed pig. “It smells as if someone is cooking. But nobody is here.”

“Don’t know,” answered Dora in the clipped tone she liked to use with Buttwynn. For the money he was paying her, she was willing to let him violate her however he wished. But that didn’t mean that she had to have a conversation with the creepy pig-faced man. “Don’t care. I wanna drink.”

Placing his hand on her bony back and sliding it down to grab her ass and nudge her forward at the same time, Buttwynn leads Dora to the theater room to fix them a drink.

“Now, what the dickens is this?” Buttwynn shouts when they enter the theater room and see the bulbous, hirsute little man passed out in the reclining chair, his boxers down around the ankles and the robe wide open and freely displaying wilted and reddened genitals. “I said, hey there fella! What the dickens is this?” Buttwynn kicks Askew’s foot to wake him. “I’m calling the police.” He turns and walks away from Askew with the intention of getting to a phone.

Askew is shaken from sleep by the irate Buttwynn. The man who always tipped him a quarter. The man who never said
thank you
. The Fucker who figuratively and invariably spits a big loogie in the face of pizza delivery guys. The Fucker who is kicking him in the foot and yelling at him. Askew leaps from his chair, boxers still around his ankles, and screams: “Hold it right there, Buttwynn!” Buttwynn continues to walk away. “Hold it right there, you Fucker, or I’ll fucking shoot you.”

Buttwynn stops in his tracks and turns to face Askew. He eyes him and then flashes a look of recognition. “Say,” says Buttwynn. “I know you, don’t I? Where do I know you from?”

“Shut up, Fucker! Shut up!” Askew, his voice rising in pitch, levels the blunderbuss at Buttwynn and yells at him, “Don’t you fucking worry about where you know me from! It don’t matter! And if you know what’s good for ya, you’ll keep your mouth shut and let me
condemplate
this situation!”

“I know where I know you from,” Buttwynn smiles and shakes his pointer finger at Askew. “You’re that funny-looking little pizza guy. The one who’s always late. The one who gave me my pizza with the cheese stuck to the top of the box last week. Always have something smart to say. I don’t even know why I’m so generous to you with my tips.”

“I said shut up or I’ll shoot!” Askew yells. Dora backs away from Buttwynn, away from the area where the odd-looking gun is pointed, and finds herself backed against a wall but well out of Buttwynn’s vicinity. “Just shut up!”

“Listen, Sonny,” condescends Buttwynn, “that blunderbuss that you’re holding is an antique. It’s for display purposes. It’s only been shot a few times, and it’s not loaded now, I can tell you that. So stop threatening to shoot me. Why don’t you just hand me that toy, and let me get on with calling the police?” Buttwynn sucks at his rat-like teeth, making a moist, squeaky sound, and starts in Askew’s direction.

“I said stay back, you Fucker!” screams Askew. He pulls the hammer from half to full-cock position. Buttwynn stops again.

“Come now. You must be kidding, Sir. I am confident that my gun is not loaded. And I’m sure that if you did find my shot and powder, you would have no idea how to properly load the gun and pack the barrel. Heck, you can’t even get my order right when I call for pizza.” Buttwynn starts again in the direction of Askew under the assumption that the gun is not loaded. Buttwynn is wrong.

BLAMMMMO!

A flash explodes from the end of the blunderbuss and propels a fiery load of metal shot and nails toward Buttwynn. The blast of debris hits him in the gut and knocks him backward; metal balls and nails chew a massive chunk of flesh from his torso. The shot exits his back and splatters the wall with bloody nails, fluids and bits and pieces of Randy Buttwynn. As he lies on the ground, the remainder of his life quickly seeping into the carpeting, he looks at the bloody splotch on the wall. In the pattern, he sees the face of his father, a face he had forgotten long ago.

•  •  •

Grundish takes in the scene without speaking. The beanpole-of-a-girl, in her cut-off shorts and pink t-shirt, cowers and whimpers in the corner, her face in her hands, her body shivering. On the floor is an overweight hunk of bloody pig-faced cadaver. The missing puzzle piece of the corpse is splattered on the wall in a shape that reminds Grundish of a prison transport van. Standing in front of the dead man is Askew, mumbling blankly to himself. “Shit. Fucking shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.” His hand still grips the wooden stock of the mighty blunderbuss, his finger still on the trigger.

Without a word, Grundish moves about the room and evaluates the situation.
Dead guy splattered on the wall
, he notes to himself,
not good
. He grabs the crusty blanket from the floor in front of Askew and covers the corpse sprawled out in front of him.
Askew with a cannon in his hands and another homicide to answer for. Not good
. Grundish grabs the barrel of the gun with one hand and grabs Askew’s wrist down near where he is gripping the gun. Askew allows the blunderbuss to be pulled from his grip. Grundish tosses the gun in the corner opposite the cowering girl.
Skeletal girl going into shock in the corner. Tiny little pants. Chain around her boot. Shaking in the corner. She’s a teenage prostitute
.
^[29]
With a hand on her elbow and one hooked under her other arm, Grundish helps the girl stand. He walks her over to a reclining chair and sits her down.

Grabbing the pack of Blue Llamas from atop the pool table, Grundish extracts three cigarettes and lights them all at the same time, handing one to Askew, one to Dora, and keeping one for himself. Dora accepts the smoke and drags hard on it, her hand still shaking as she holds the cigarette up to her mouth. Askew jams his smoke in the gap between his front teeth and lets it dangle. Grundish sucks on his cigarette and gives Askew the hairy eyeball. “God damn, I wish you would quit smoking. I can’t quit if you keep doing it in front of me.”

“I know. I’m gonna quit at the end of the month,” Askew answers. He is happy that they are not talking about the single, solitary, thing that everybody in the room is thinking about: the fat dead guy on the floor.

“So, that must be Buttwynn,” says Grundish.

“Yeah. That’s him. He was coming at me, and he was gonna call the cops on us. And then he started talking about how generous he was with his tips. He was a real Fucker right to the end. So I shot him,” says Askew matter-of-factly, as if explaining why he took a right turn at a red light.

“Obviously,” says Grundish. He ashes his cigarette on the floor and takes another hit off of it. “So, what we’ve got here is what we call a situation. And if it ain’t a bona fide situation, it’ll do until the real thing comes along.”

“Uh-huh.” Askew nods and waits for his friend to figure out what to do.

“We have a dead body. We’re already wanted for the Bumpy D situation. We have a hostage upstairs. Now we have another person that we can’t let go. I have one mean bastard-of-a-hangover. And we don’t know when the rest of the Buttwynn family will be showing up here.”

“The family won’t be here for two more days,” says the girl under her breath.

“What’s that, Sweetheart?” Grundish asks. “Speak up. I can’t hear you.”

She takes a long drag off of her smoke, burning the remainder of the tobacco, and says again, “I said, the family won’t be here for two more days.”

“Well, that’s good news. Now, what’s your name, Sweetheart?”

“Dora,” she answers and looks down at her hands.

“Well, Dora, first off, let me tell you this. We ain’t gonna hurt you or nothing. But we can’t let you leave here right now either. You’re gonna stay here while I figure out what to do. Okay?

“I guess I don’t got no choice, do I?” she says.

“No, you don’t. Now, I need to know how you are so sure that the family won’t be here for two more days.”

“Well, if you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m, like, an escort, so to speak. That man,” she looks at Buttwynn, “paid me for two days of services. And we was planning on staying here in his house and partying while the family was gone.”

“And he told you that?”

“Yep.”

“And he brought you to his house while his wife and kids are gone?”

“Yep.”

“What a Fucker!”

“I told ya,” says Askew. “I told ya! The man is a Fucker!”

“Well, we need to be out of here within a day. And the sooner the better.” Grundish drops his butt on the carpet and smashes it out. “Where the hell is Turleen, anyway?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” answers Askew as he crushes his cigarette out on Buttwynn’s head.

•  •  •

Turleen is sleeping the sleep of a one-lunged octogenarian who has been awake for several days straight, cooking, drinking wine, and breathing in as much second-hand smoke as she can manage. Laid out spread-eagle on the Buttwynn guest bed, one arm curled around an empty, wicker-wrapped Chianti bottle like it’s a teddy bear, and twitching the minor spasms of one in deep REM mode, Turleen soundly sleeps through screams and gunshots. Instead she finds herself in a smoky pool hall leaning up against a table and surrounded by dogs.