The Minotauress (48 page)

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Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: The Minotauress
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Dean scratched his balls again, and loped for the kitchen—
—
and shifted and jigged and jagged and—
"Oh no," Dean croaked.
There he stood, in the bedroom, as Daphne, in the same Givenchy off-shoulder organdy, railed at the all-too-obvious evidence of tobacco juice on the carpet.
Her face burned at him, a rigid mask of contempt. "I KNOW what that is on the floor! And you WILL clean it up!" Daphne's bellow threatened to beat plaster-dust from the ceiling. "You'll shampoo this rug, TODAY!"
"But-but-but, honey? It's Sunday. There's no place open where I can rent a carpet cleaner—"
"You'll do it by HAND, on your KNEES!" came her next bellow. "Jesus CHRIST, Dean! The harder I work, the lazier you get! That convention in Vegas was HARD work! And for the whole time you're sitting here on your ass drinking with that dingleberry Ajax and SPITTING on the FLOOR!"
"Honey, please—"
"Shut up, you redneck slob. Christ, all I've done for you, and this is how you repay me? You're not back at the ranch anymore, shoveling cow shit and hosing down the stalls! We're in the CITY now, we're CITY PEOPLE! And you better start acting like it!"
Dean stood slack as a Gumby doll. "I'm sorry, honey. I don't know what came over me. I—"
"Shut up!" she repeated. "Get out of my sight! And start getting this SHIT-HOLE cleaned up! Oh, and you were supposed to roll up that GODDAMN hose in the front yard a fucking WEEK ago! So roll it up so I don't have to TRIP over it anymore!"
"Yes, honey, I'm sorry, honey," Dean blathered and backed out of the bedroom. He wasn't scratching his balls now; in fact, at this precise moment, he felt like he didn't have any balls at all. Daphne might as well have been wearing them for earrings.
What the hell happened?
he thought in the utmost distress. His brain felt like overcooked meatloaf.
Did I really spit chaw on the rug?
Yes. He remembered that much, at least. Last night Ajax had come over. They'd gotten ‘faced. Ajax had taken the late 194 home, leaving Dean to chug whiskey and pass out on the couch.
But I didn't really spit on the rug, did I?
The answer was plain, unless Santa Claus had been in here last night six months early with a lip full of Skoal.
Oh, man. What's happening to me?
All too suddenly, Ajax' unconvincing psycho-babble didn't sound quite so unconvincing any more.
Maybe he's right. Maybe I'm really two people, divided between my ideals. Maybe I really do have a genuine split personality...
"And get the fucking newspaper!" Daphne shouted down from upstairs. "It's been sitting out in the middle of the GODDAMN driveway all morning!"
"Yes, sweetheart!" he raised his voice back. "I was just about to do that."
Dean pulled on his jeans, which were strewn across the coffee table. He stumbled out the front door, into raving sunlight, then stumbled again and tripped over a coil of unrolled garden hose that lay stretched across the sidewalk like a trip-wire.
Dean fell flat on his chin.
CHAPTER SIX
W
ithin a week, six more DeSmet children where found dead within proximity to the long-closed Stoddard's Mill. All were found in the same disrepair: gastro-intestinal organs evacuated through a ragged aperture. All appeared to have been gored in the chest.
As if by a bull.
Sergeant A.T. Lass was sufficiently apeshit, and so were the residents of DeSmet.
"My baby boy got killed! Where were you!" shrieked Janice Stumore when Lass went to pick up his "pad." Janice lived at the Callisto-Brownsroad Trailer Court with her common-law hubby Leonard. Leonard had a masters in organic chemistry from M.I.T.; he was also a meth-head who'd gravitated to DeSmet after escaping the correctional custody of the Massachusetts State Police Narcotics Unit. Here, Leonard ran the biggest ice lab in the county, and in order to continue to operate, certain payments needed to be made to certain constables of the law. One day, Lass knew, this trailer and a third of the park would go up in a minor mushroom cloud when Leonard fired up a pipe too close to the solvent.
"Here ya go, Adam-12," Leonard said through his Fu Manchu beard. Greasy hair hung like black worms. "Always a pleasure." Then he slapped five century notes into Lass' fat paw. Janice's mad bellowing ripped through the paper-thin walls.
"Guess she's taking it pretty hard," Lass, not much in the way of smarts, deducted.
Leonard put his thick black glasses on, squinting at a triple-beam balance as he weighed product. "Sure. Her kid's ground chuck in the morgue."
"Come on. Her kid was a retard with a head shaped like a pinto bean," Lass pointed out. "Christ, she had him turning tricks on Main Street for chickenhawk pervs." This much was true. Kevvy Stumore, thirteen years old, had every learning disability known to the
American Journal of Psychiatry,
and a malformed cranial vault due to maladapted fissural calcium formation during the first trimester, thanks to his mother's chronic speed use during pregnancy. Kevvy was a trick baby to a meth-whore. He was
all
 fucked up.
Perv homos paid the little mutant ten bucks for front-seat blowjobs. The way Lass saw it, the world was a teensy bit better without him.
"Look, I gotta bust one," Lass informed because, see, the first part of the deal was hush-money. But Lass was also entitled to partake of Janice's sexual flesh whenever the urge rose—that was the second part of the deal. "She's sounding kind of crazy now—"
Leonard got up from his make-shift lab table, walked out to the "living" room. "My poor little baby boy got butchered while that fat cop piece of shit was eating donuts, Leonard!" Spit gusted from her lips. "My beautiful baby boy!"
Leonard promptly kicked her in the side of the head, which put an end to her agitation but fast. One of her few remaining teeth flew out. "She's all yours, Officer," Leonard told Lass. "Go to town." Then he walked back to his lab and closed the door.
Fuck.
Janice was thirty-five but looked fifty-five. She certainly wasn't busy now; that's why Lass never saw any harm. Her dirty feet stuck up as he pulled her dirty jeans off her dirty legs. Looking at her split junkie beaver, his far-less-than-average-sized penis rocked in his pants.
Aw, shit!
By the time he got his trooper trousers down, there was no time to sink it in her. Two quick shucks with his hand and he was squirting all over her.
Oh well,
 he thought at the waves of sensation. The droplets of sperm glittered off her corpse-white skin. Lass beat out the last and sighed.
That's what I call good lovemaking,
 he thought. He stuffed his putty dick back in his pants as his heart raced down.
Janice looked dead lying there. Perhaps she
was
 dead, but that would be no biggie. One less meth-head whore in the world was almost as good as one less lawyer.
"Sorry about your kid," he muttered and left. But even Lass could not have guessed that as his sperm dried on Janice's face and fried-egg junkie tits, yet another DeSmet, South Dakota, child was gored, mauled, and eaten only a few miles away.
««—»»
Dean's mouth sucked to hers. Their bodies entwined, and their tongues roved over one another. Each stroke into the hot cup of her sex brought an intractable bliss, and she cried into his mouth. She came for fifteen minutes, and when she could come no further, she pushed him off, then sucked him off. Dean spent himself in volume down her tongue. She swallowed without hesitance.
Dean lolled over, exhausted. She massaged his spent balls with one hand, caressed his face with the other... .
"Why did you leave me, why did you leave me?"
Leave?
Dean thought. "Daphne, I would
never
 le—"
Blackish liquid began to trickle from her nostrils and corners of her mouth; simultaneously, a stench rose so foul that Dean audibly gagged. His eyes burned like riot gas. But he recognized the stench at once—it was rendering bilge—and when he looked between her legs, more of the noxious liquid oozed from her sex.
"Why, honey? Why? I
loved
 you... ."
Moonlight blazed on her face. It was not Daphne. It was Arianne.
"We could have had everything," she sobbed. Even her tears were bilge. Then she vomited in a plume directly into his face. Not puke. Rendering bilge.
The Baby Ben alarm clock rattled like an annoying toy. Dean woke up in an empty bed, flinging off imaginary bilge.
Holy shit...
The nightmare left him bolt upright, shivering. His hand padded sideward and found nothing but cold sheets where his wife should be. Then he remembered: she'd left yesterday for a design show in Chicago.
God in heaven,
 he thought.
Dean sat up, wearing only boxers. He scratched his balls and fell into nebulous thought as a long sigh stretched across his mind.
He saw his life now, in its utter disappointment, and then he saw his old life, in its crude, earthy glory.
I was
somebody
back then,
he realized.
I was somebody
special.
Good Dean, Bad Dean,
he thought.
Blackouts, split-personality, and now nightmares about rendering bilge.
Dean wondered if he could be any more fucked up... and doubted it.
««—»»
"What the fuck is rendering bilge?" Ajax asked.
"Liquefied waste from dead cattle," Dean explained from the bar stool. "Drippings. Organic flux." He'd asked Ajax to meet him at THE WHARF after work, curious to the point of anxiety as to how his friend would interpret the nightmare.
"Sounds lovely." Ajax chewed a contemplative lip. "And I'm wondering... "
"Yeah?"
"In what manner does this... bilge... reflect the inner-workings of Dean Lohan's tumultuous subconscious mind? How can it be applied to the symbology of your soul?"
"That's what I want you to tell me," Dean asserted.
"I need a drink... to help me think." Ajax frowned down the long bar. "Christ, do I gotta scalp myself to get the barmaid's attention? What's a guy gotta do to get a beer in this out-house?"
"Scalping is fine, but that's kind of messy," the barmaid said, appearing from nowhere. 38 double-D's looked like twin duckpin balls stretching a make-shift black halter-top that read DEMONOID PHENOMENON in dripping white letters. Pewter skulls clinked, dangling from the ends of Kool-Aid-pink corn-rows. "Just hang yourself. That'll get my attention for sure."
Ajax slumped, embarrassed at being overheard. Dean chuckled.
"A Redhook and a Hefeweizen," Ajax ordered.
The barmaid stared. "
Excuse
me?
What's
 the magic word?"
Ajax's face smoldered. "Uh, please?"
The barmaid trounced off for the taps, tits rocking.
"What a hostile goth bitch," Ajax remarked under his breath. "I think I'm in love. Christ, I could spend the rest of my life just checking her for lumps."
"Back to the topic, please," Dean said.
"The topic? Her tits? Yeah, man, she doesn't even need air bags in her car. I wish I was her kid—I'd breast-feed till I was forty."

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