Grundish & Askew (6 page)

The spray from the sink soaks them. Velda leans down and twists off the water valve still connected to the wall. Still, Grundish’s priapism persists. Still his hunger remains. He buttons up his pants. “I have to get back to work, Ms. Velda,” he tells her, avoiding her eyes. He heads out the door, back to his just-above-minimum-wage-arrow-sign-hell. Velda remains and contemplates how she could allow herself to fall in love with one of her charges.

•  •  •

During the next week Grundish acts mostly on instinct. With Ms. Velda’s recent visit, Grundish doesn’t expect another visit from her for the next five or so days. He calls in sick to work, claiming the flu. And then he gets to work on the list. The rest of the houses on Askew’s list are good. Grundish thinks to himself, during his more sober moments, that it is a good plan – having Askew case houses while he’s delivering pizza. Grundish tells Askew what to watch for while he’s driving around: front doors with notes for delivery men, days’ worth of newspapers in the driveways, all but one light on in the house and all blinds or curtains closed, mailboxes overflowing with mail and flyers, un-mowed lawns. Askew makes a list. Grundish checks it out. Grundish sneaks in and out of the houses, a greedy grinch grabbing goods. At each house he gorges himself on the best food, drinks the best liquor. At each place he passes out. At each, he wakes the next day and leaves his new calling card, dropping a monster dooty log in the crapper, leaving it to wallow in the cool water, no soggy toilet paper to keep it company, waiting for the home owner to discover it upon his return. At each he snags the best goods, always thinking about what Askew and Turleen will like, and loads them into his newly-pilfered daypack. He retreats to the trailer and sleeps during the day, returning to the addresses on the list under the cover of the night to strike again.

At the final hit on the list, Grundish stuffs his daypack full of frozen meats: steaks, burgers, and pounds and pounds of kosher hotdogs. The migraine floaters threaten debilitation and are once again quelled with a huge snort of aged scotch. He goes into the bathroom one last time and leaves his steaming umber calling card. He admires his work. And then he sneaks out the back door, grabs his bike, and peddles away unnoticed, back to his trailer to sleep off the migraine for the rest of the weekend.

•  •  •

At the trailer, Turleen lounges on the couch in the front room, sleeping off her own bender from the burgled wine Grundish brought her. “Hi there, Honey,” she says to Grundish as he flops down in a broken recliner. “Do you mind lighting up one of Leroy’s cigarettes and smoking it? I can’t smoke anymore, but I do like the smell of it, I do. Just blow it over in my direction.” She cackles at her own cleverness in circumventing her doctor’s orders. The cackle turns into a phlegmy cough. “Ah shucks,” she smiles and wipes her mouth, “when I find out that I am dying of something, I’m gonna start smoking again, I am. I kind of look forward to it. Might as well at least enjoy my final days, eh?”

Grundish shrugs his shoulders and lights up a Blue Llama that he doesn’t even want. They both drift off to sleep with wisps of smoke swirling around them in the trailer.

Instead of sleeping off a hangover, Askew works a split shift of pizza delivery. Sunday mornings during football season, there is always a lot of prep work required to have everything ready for the game-time rush. And Sunday mornings during football season always find Askew performing the necessary pizza prep.

The Sunday football rush is busy. If an order is fucked up, nobody cares. They still take the food. The customers are drinking and watching the Bucs’ game and don’t feel like waiting another hour for the right pizza. The bad news: no leftover pizza for Askew to take home for dinner. Due to the complete lack of leftover grub at the end of his first shift, Askew pulls into Barry’s Big Beef Palace drive-through, orders the #5 combo meal and plumps it up for an additional fifty cents.

And the Fast Food Gods are watching over Askew. It’s the type of thing people seem to say when something goes right: the (
fill in the blank
) gods were watching over me. The phrase is trite. It seems that every person attributes any given fortuitous result to a particular god or gods and the words lose all meaning and power. But, in Askew’s case, the Fast Food Gods really were looking over him. Coniraya, once the Incan God of the Moon, and Zotz, the Mayan Bat God, temporarily share duties as the Fast Food Gods until they get bored or something better comes along. Times are hard for ancient gods. Down-on-their-luck deities tend to take odd jobs until perhaps they come back into style or give it up and retire. Both Coniraya and Zotz were once powerful but were later relegated to obscurity with the steep decline of their worshipers.

Coniraya was known for fashioning his sperm into a fruit which a mortal woman ate and was then impregnated. When she learned that the child was Coniraya’s, she rejected him and fled, eventually turning herself into a rock. Potential worshipers are mostly turned off to worshiping him, as it is generally considered icky to eat his sperm. Given the choice, most people would elect the option of turning themselves into stone over guzzling a load of Coniraya’s fruity jizz.

Zotz is a giant bat-like being. The cave god. Foamy candies are named after him. He commanded as little respect as Coniraya once his people’s civilization disappeared.

After losing all potential worshipers, Coniraya mostly passed time by appearing to mortal women and having sex with them. He still liked to trick the ladies into eating his sperm and impregnating them. Zotz prefers straight up intercourse with mortals and is a prolific breeder. Occasionally his offspring are still discovered living in caves, malformed, demented and mentally impaired – the best known being the dolt-child known to most as
Bat Boy
who is widely considered to be a hoax created by a tabloid newspaper.

All clichés aside, the Fast Food Gods really were watching over Askew. The drive-through cashier at Barry’s Big Beef Palace is a sickly-looking boy named Simon. His face is blighted with lumpy acne and a variety of pointy metal things stuck through the fleshier parts. He lisps to Askew, “that’ll be four theventy-nine, Thir.” Simon’s lisp is not the stereotypical homosexual affectation. It is more the I-have-my-tongue-pierced-and-I-have-a-self-imposed-speech-impediment kind of lisp. The lingual barbell clicks against Simon’s chipped front teeth as he talks, making Askew cringe.

Askew hands a twenty-dollar bill over to Simon and receives $55.21 in change. Before he can even begin to pocket the overpayment, Simon hands out a large bag packed to the top with burgers and fries and every kind of greasy deep-fried morsel Barry’s Big Beef Palace has to offer. Flashing a big chipped smile and knocking tiny fragments off of his teeth with the barbell, Simon tells Askew, “thank you, Thir. Pleathe come back again.”

•  •  •

Zotz and Coniraya look down on their work. And it is good. They smile upon Askew and wish him well. “Do you wanna make a grill cook hock a loogie on a cop’s sandwich?” Coniraya asks his colleague.

“No. I think I’d prefer to go down to Earth to get some poontang,” says Zotz. “You feel like tag-teaming a mortal hottie?”

“Yeah,” smiles Coniraya, “I think we’ve done enough work for today. Let’s do it.”

“Groovy,” says Zotz. He flashes his pointy bat-toothed smile and stretches, spreading his wings. “Please just don’t try to get them to eat the sperm fruit again. I hate having to kiss them after they’ve had that in their mouths.”

Askew studies the sanguineous meat juice seepage that has soaked into the carpeting around the daypack Grundish left sitting on the floor before falling asleep. “What the fuck? It smells like raw meat in here.”

Grundish stirs, abruptly stands for a moment, his hand to his head, his vision tunnels down to a pinpoint and a load of head-rush dizziness kicks him right between the eyes. Gravity grabs onto the back of his shirt and yanks hard, dragging him back into his broken recliner. “
Ugghhhhh
,” Grundish exclaims, his hand still slapped to his head, trying to push down the rhythmic throbbing in his temples.

“You better eat something. You can take care of the mess later,” says Askew, evaluating his friend’s condition. “I knew you’d be in bad shape so I stopped off and bought us a feast. Even used all my tips on it,” he lies, handing Grundish a bag of unidentifiable fried nuggets. “I was thinking of you, Buddy. Have a bag of mystery nuggets.”

Grundish stares at the greasy breaded morsels. The nuggets stare back at Grundish. Neither knows what to make of the other. In an effort to understand the fried lumps, Grundish bites one in half and studies the piece. “This one looks like sausage but tastes like ham,” he says, still chewing his food, and pops the remaining fraction of a nugget into his mouth to reunite it with its masticated other half. Grundish holds the open end of the nugget bag toward Askew, offering him his friendship with a side of trans-fat-soaked, breaded mystery lumps.

“Naw,” Askew shakes his head and peers into the Beef Palace bag. “I gots me some a’ my own.” He extracts two bags of mystery nuggets and sets one on the coffee table beside a still-sleeping Turleen. He pulls out one nugget and sets it on the pillow just under her nose. The old lady stirs, nostrils flaring. A light trickle of saliva runs out of the side of her mouth, hangs briefly on her cheek, then drops and soaks into the fabric of the couch. Studying his own mystery bag, Askew pulls out a lump half the size of his fist and bites into it like chomping on an apple. His face twists. Confusion dawns on the features. His thumb and pointer finger probe the inside of his mouth, searching through the mushy mass of fried mung and extract a beak. Askew holds the beak twelve inches before his eyes and examines the tooth marks scraped on the curious bird part.
^[12]
“Dammmn,” he smiles, “I got me fried chicken parts. And I thought I scored the jackpot with a giant corn-fritter.” The smile is less complete than before biting into the parts-fritter – a fragment is absent from the right front tooth.

“Damn, dawg. It looks like you chipped your tooth,” says Grundish. He pops a full nugget into his mouth. “Mmmm, corn.”

Askew’s tongue explores the rough edge of the chip, “Aww, it ain’t that bad.
For all intensive purposes
it don’t make no difference. So long as I can still hold a cigarette between my teeth, I can’t get too upset about it. “

“I thought you were gonna quit smoking.”

“I am. Next month. I can still puff away right now while I’m getting used to the idea, right?

“Yeah, I guess so.” Grundish grabs a fried salad roll-up from the bag and starts in on it. “You know, I’ve been thinking about that talk we had about the Fuckers.”

“The Fuckers?”

“Yeah, the Fuckers.” Grundish wads up the greasy paper from his fried salad wrap and throws it at Askew. The wad bounces off of Askew’s forehead. “Are you daft, Boy? The Fuckers. We talked about this two nights ago. The people that shit on us. The people that just don’t belong in society. Ms. Velda. The Buttwynns. Remember? The Fuckers.”

“Yep. I remember now.” Askew gets up and grabs two beers, one for himself and one serving of hair of the dog for Grundish. “Matter of fact, I had a delivery to Buttwynn, today.” He nods his head and smiles. “And I got the fucker.”

“What’d you do?”

“I shook his pizza really hard so that the cheese would stick to the top of the box. That’ll teach him to be such a shitty tipper.”

“Yeah, Buddy. I applaud your efforts. You’ve got the right attitude. But you’re pussing out. You need to do something more. Really show him he’s a Fucker.” Grundish chugs his malted brew. The throb of the hangover begins to back off. He dips a breaded frumunda cheese
^[13]
stick in ranch dressing and shoves the whole stick in his mouth.

“Like what? I don’t want to lose my job.”

“You do two things for me and I’ll tell you what to do. Number one, go get me another beer. And B, put another mystery nugget under Turleen’s nose. That one you gave her is gone. She probably wants another.”

Turleen’s nugget is gone, even though neither Askew nor Grundish saw her eat it. And she is still asleep. Askew gently places another nugget under her nose. Again, the old lady stirs, nostrils flaring. Another trickle of saliva runs out of the side of her mouth, hangs briefly on her cheek, then adds more moistness to the already-stained upholstery.

“Well, here’s another beer. Now, you tell me what to do.”

“I can’t give you specifics. I can only lead by example,” Grundish says. “Like what I’m getting ready to do. Take notes if you like, and learn from the best.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“I’m sick of the Fuckers in this trailer park. Every day I see those Fuckers out there, and they turn my stomach, you know?” Grundish stuffs two more frumunda cheese sticks in his mouth and chews, and thinks, and chews, and thinks some more. “We are probably the only ones in this trailer park that aren’t registered sex offenders. These people are here because they are despicable. And society has told them that there are only a few places they are allowed to be. And we’re hunkered down right in their midst because we can’t afford to be anywhere nicer.”

“So, what’re you gonna do about it?”

Grundish places a cheese stick under Turleen’s nose in the spot where the last nugget was. Turleen doesn’t stir. Neither Grundish nor Askew saw her eat the second nugget. But, it is gone.

“I’m gonna strike fear into their hearts. I’m gonna get payback for the people they victimized. I know Fuckers like these people. I saw them in the joint all the time.”

“You mean you saw people
simular
to these guys, right?” Askew asks. “I mean, you don’t recognize any of these people from prison, do you?”

“Mostly, no. But, uh...” Grundish’s nose wrinkles and his top lip twists up into a sneer. “You know that guy in Lot 49, right down at the end of our lane?”

Askew nods. “You mean the guy that stands out on the corner and tries to hand out balloon animals to kids?”