Grundish & Askew (9 page)

Askew drives and stares straight ahead, following directions from Grundish but hearing nothing else that is said. He pushes the cigarette lighter in and waits. Turleen’s and Grundish’s voices are distant and muffled, as if coming to him through the water. The lighter pops out. Askew presses his knee against the steering wheel and catapults a Blue Llama up into his mouth. The cigarette finds itself wedged in the gap between his chipped and yellowed front teeth. Askew holds the lighter up and looks at the red hot metal coil. He touches the coil to the cigarette and inhales. Pulling the lighter back, Askew notes a small piece of tobacco is stuck to the red hot metal and is quickly reduced to ash.

Directing the unthinking driver out of the suburban sprawl, Grundish tells Askew to turn left, right, straight ahead, left again and leads them out onto slow country roads, away from what would now be designated a crime scene. “Over there,” points Grundish, “pull over there, under that roof.” Off to the left side of the road stands a deserted metal structure with no walls. The structure covers an area of ground equivalent to the size of a basketball court. Rusty I-beams, thirty feet high, are capped off with a heavily oxidized metal roof. The structure, neglected and abandoned, is now a dumping ground – a depressing graveyard for dead refrigerators, dishwashers and other discarded household appliances. Littered about the overgrown ground are broken beer bottles, condoms, food wrappers, syringes and tires. A rusted old truck is turned on its side, the windows shattered. A discarded television set rests on a stump, its unbroken screen sadly blank, and its plug dangling impotently. A dry-rotted whitewall tire lies on the ground. It encircles a bushy growth of orange wildflowers, nature’s beauty thriving in the midst of the obsolete and discarded manmade debris.

Grundish exits the car and Turleen follows. Turleen, an index finger looped through the ring of the jug, holds the wine out to Grundish again. The wine helps to slow his racing mind. Askew still sits in the El Camino, smoking. The ashes on the cigarette, unflicked since being lit, are gray and severe in their droopage.
^[18]

“Hey there, Fuckstick!” Grundish addresses Askew, slapping the windshield to get his attention. Askew jumps and the cigarette ashes fall onto the front of his white tank-top shirt. Eyes blinking rapidly, a quick side to side shake of his head, and Askew is back in the moment. “You with us, Pal?” Grundish asks and gets a nod from Askew. “Good, then. Get out of the car, and let’s put our heads together.”

“Listen up, Sonny, I need my rheumatism medicine back while you boys figure out what to do next,” says Turleen, now sitting comfortably on a discarded toilet, her back leaned against the cracked tank.

“What do we do now? I think I done killed Bumpy D,” says Askew with a look resembling something like satisfaction on his face. “I’ve never been in a fight in my life. I just fucking lost it when that guy splooged in my face. I mean,” he stops and ruminates briefly, nods affirmatively as if agreeing with the voices in his head, “yeah. That mother fugger had it coming. And I’m glad I did it.” Askew stops, smiles, and asks Grundish: “Ain’t you gonna
land blast
me for getting us into this situation? I really kind of shit the bed, if you know what I mean.”

“Hell no, Brother,” Grundish shrugs his shoulders. “Bumpy D never would have come in gunnin’ for me if I hadn’ta gone a little batshit myself there. This is as much my doing as it is yours. I ain’t got no cause to go blaming you.”

“That slimy piece of shit did have it coming to him, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, I reckon he probably did.”

“Well, I’m kinda proud of myself, then.”

“Well, you can spank the dolphin over it later,” says Grundish. “Right now we’ve gotta figure out where we can lay low. Do you have a new list for me?”

“Nope. No, I don’t. But I think I know a house that’s gonna be available for a couple of days. It’s that Buttwynn fucker’s place. I’ve been watching his house real close because I’ve wanted you to hit his joint for a while now. So far as I can tell, he’s been gone for a couple of days. And I’d love to hunker down in his pad.”

“Are you sure that the house is empty?” asks Grundish.

“As sure as I can be. I mean, his cars haven’t been in the driveway, all of the lights in the house seem to be off, all of the curtains closed, the grass needs to be cut,
excetera, excetera
...”

“You sure about this place?” Grundish asks.

“As sure as I can be,” Askew answers. “But then again, I’m no professional burglar. Maybe I’m sure, but I can’t be certain. I’ve
appraised
you of all of the things I noticed. I mean, if you think that what I’ve seen doesn’t
jive
with Buttwynn being gone, then we can try something else. But that’s what I’ve got to suggest right now.”

“Can you give me directions on how to get to his house?” Grundish asks.

“Well, fuck yes. I deliver pizza, don’t I? I have to know my way around, you know.”

With a map drawn on the back of a pizza shop menu and a belly full of sour wine, Grundish hefts his bike from the bed of the El Camino. “I need you to stay here while I check things out,” Grundish tells Askew. “Don’t go anywhere. I mean it. And, if you hear people coming, hide in the brush until I come for you. Okay?”

“Hide in the brush,” says Askew slowly.

“That’s it. Hide in the brush until I come for you. Can you remember that?”

“You got it, Grundish” smiles Askew, unexpectedly happy for just having snuffed out a human life with his bare and now-swollen hands. “Hide in the brush ‘til you come.”

“If I’m not back by two in the morning, head out of here and bring the car to Buttwynn’s house. Otherwise, I’ll be back before then and we’ll come up with plan B.”

“I need more wine, I do, if you find it necessary to come back,” commands Turleen imperiously, and a bit slurred, from her porcelain throne. “Another jug of Chianti if you get a chance. And a fleet enema. And maybe some panty liners as long as you’re at the store getting my wine. Big, thick, panty liners, fella. Oh yeah, and a can of feminine deodorant spray, extra strength.”

Grundish and Askew cock their heads curiously at the request for feminine products for Turleen’s superannuated plumbing. “Don’t ask,” she tells them. “You’re better off not knowing about these things. A lady has to keep the mystery, she does.”

Grundish salutes Turleen, clicks his heels at her request, and mounts his bike. “Don’t go anywhere,” he repeats to Askew. “Lay low and let me take care of this.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Brother,” answers Askew. “I’m sitting down on the hood of my car and I’m gonna teach myself what it would be like not to have hands. And I’m never going to use my hands again.” He kicks his shoes off and wedges the big toe on his right foot into the top of the sock on his left foot and thus peels the cotton tube off without the aid of his hands. He then begins the same process on the other sock.

“Perfect,” agrees Grundish before he pedals his bike away from the roof. “You can tell me all about it later.”

Grundish takes the bike through fields, across backyards, through woods and scrubs of palmetto and over dry, hard ground that will become ponds and swamps when wet season bitch-slaps the drought with a sloppy moist backhand. Once back in town he pushes the bike through the undeveloped outskirts of the housing developments and into the Happy Rambler RV Resort Park. The center of the solar system already out of view, Grundish walks the bike through the campground in anonymity, waving to the occasional resident sitting on a porch, eyeing the trailers and RV’s for vacancies, working out a Plan B, just in case.

At the community center, gray-skinned senior citizens float in the pool like sickly river otters, weakly paddling about to keep from sinking.
An appropriate metaphor for their golden years,
Grundish thinks to himself sadly. Actually, lacking the intellectual aptitude to think in terms of similes and metaphors, Grundish simply thinks to himself,
God damn, they look like a bunch of sick river otters trying to keep from sinking
. Irregardless,
^[19]
it strangely moves him. At the side of an aluminum maintenance shed, Grundish spies a canoe. He drags the green, wide-bottomed Kevlar boat to the water and sets his bike in the front. Making note of the community center for later eventualities, Grundish wades the boat out into the Alafia river and climbs in once clear of the bank.

The river, flowing in a westerly direction, does not go out of its way to help move the canoe. Grundish paddles the boat, keeping her close to the bank. The river is an old friend to Grundish. As a child he sometimes spent summers at the Vagabond Village trailer park in Gibsonton with his Aunt Bernice. Bernice was nice but always seemed to drink too much. Mostly, Grundish remembers that she made something greasy, salty, and tasty that she called scrapple. Most of Grundish’s Florida experience as a child, though, consisted of time spent canoeing and fishing on the river with a kind of surrogate father by the name of Lenny. Lenny was a black man who lived in the cab of a broken-down semi truck just off of Route 41, by the public docks, with his girlfriend, Melvetta, and their dog. Lenny told Grundish that he was from Chicago originally and was hauling a load of something or other when his truck broke down. Lenny always hung out on the shaded dock, fishing and smoking cigarillos. He would cuss, drink coffee, and sometimes reel in catfish or blue crabs on his line.
I’m gonna eat that mu’fugga tonight, cook ‘im up in a pot and have me some seafood
, Lenny would say.
Don’t talk so foul around the boy, he’s just a baby
, Melvetta would chastise him. She was a chunky white girl with stringy blond hair, and always cringed after she spoke to Lenny.
Woman, get off the dock, this ain’t no place for a female to be peckin’ at me
, Lenny would tell her. Usually she would obey. Sometimes she would yell at him a little more until Lenny would tell her,
Baby, God don’t like ugly. Now get off this man’s dock
. Lenny would apologize to Grundish, just a kid at the time, and explain that his lady was sad because she lost her babies in a car accident and she wasn’t herself sometimes.
Really
, Lenny would say,
she used to be real sweet and funny. I love that girl more than a pig loves slop. Sometimes she makes me crazy. I’m gonna stick with her, though. Shee-it
, he’d laugh,
I ain’t got nowheres better to go and neither does she
. Lenny would let Grundish use a canoe that he had somehow procured and Grundish would take that boat all up and down the river. Lenny and Melvetta lived in the truck for several years and were always around when Grundish came down for his summers with his aunt. One year, when Grundish came down, they were just gone. Years later he heard that Lenny shot Melvetta and their dog and then just disappeared. Paddling down the river now, Grundish momentarily thinks he senses the ghosts of Lenny, Melvetta and the dog. And then the feeling excuses itself and finds somewhere or someone else to haunt.

Off to the left, on the other bank of the river, a scuzzy looking band plays a Georgia Satellites tune at the Beer Shack. On the porch of the river bar, scurvy tattooed bikers laugh and yell and call each other nicknames like Snake or Knuckles or Stumpy.
It’s Sunday, and that means fifty-cent malt liquor night at the Beer Shack
, thinks Grundish. A garbage can full of ice and 24-ounce cans of off-brand malt liquors sits on the dock. In order to get the cheap beer, the customers have to dig deep into the garbage can and pull out whatever can they grab. They pay fifty cents and take their poison. Aiming toward the opposite shore, Grundish paddles over and pulls the canoe up beside the dock. Climbing the steps up to the porch, Grundish heads for the malt liquor barrel. He pulls a handful of change from his pocket and counts it: three dimes, two nickels, and three pennies. The ice cold contents of the barrel freezes his hand as he gropes about and pulls out a steel white can that says
Malt Liquor
on it and nothing else.
When the hell did they stop making steel cans
, he wonders to himself as he walks over and slaps his handful of change down on the counter. “It’s all I got,” he tells the barmaid, Kimmie.

Kimmie looks down at the change, then up at Grundish again. “All right,” she says, “but you don’t want to be in here. Everybody knows about what you and your buddy done. Ain’t nobody here gonna give you a hard time about it. But we don’t need no trouble either. I just got my liquor license back. So do me a favor, Grundish. Just take your drink and slink on out of here. I never saw you here and neither did anybody else.”

Grundish drains the generic can of malt liquor and returns to the canoe. He lies back on his seat and stares up at the full moon as the slight flow of the river gently urges the boat downstream. He stays on his back for a while in the canoe and allows her to drift. He drifts under an overpass and pulls the boat onto the northern side of the river under the bridge. Up above, on the bridge, traffic goes by and cares nothing about the tattooed man hiding underneath. Grundish extracts his bike from the canoe and commences to pedaling it again, heading north and west through backyards and on dimly lit streets, pulling off and hiding in the bushes when headlights approach. Eventually, based upon Askew’s instructions, Grundish finds himself at the side of a darkened house in an upscale neighborhood.

The house is dark and quiet. Probably empty. No cars in the driveway, no noises from within. Grundish lays his hands on the aluminum siding and rests his forehead against the house. Like a phrenologist reading lumps on a skull, his fingers gently slide over the side of the house, pausing on notches in the siding, lightly tapping, divining the nature of the building. Nothing there to tell him that it is occupied. Following his strict protocol for entry, he finds an unlocked window and creeps in. Stealthy and slow, Grundish fluidly slinks through the unlit building, never bumping into anything, never tripping, never a noise, just effortlessly flowing through the house. He stops in a room, sits back in a leather home theater chair, pops out the footrest and reclines the back. He closes his eyes and opens his mind. Clearing his head of all thoughts, Grundish sends out energy and waits for it to bounce back. He concludes that house is clear and begins to ready the place for Askew and Turleen’s arrival.