Bullet Through Your Face (improved format) (27 page)

“Oh, these poor fellas,” Hays made some sarcasm. “Cain’t even
talk loud. Sounds like cruel’n unusual punishment ta me, like we’se
fuckin’ with their civil rights! Dang, Chief, ya thank we oughta call
the ACLU?”

Past the main halls were dormitories, not cells, and a number
of classrooms. A college-like cafeteria came next, nice tables’n
chairs. “Shee-it, Chief,” Micah Hays vented more opinion. “I gotta
agree with Claude. This ain’t no way to deal with a bunch’a wiseass
undiscerplined punks. Our tax dollars goin’ into footsie joints like
this so’s a bunch’a criminals can have fancy dorm rooms with TVs
and nice beds and a blammed cafferteria! They oughta be sleepin’on
wire bunks and eatin’ cold beans off a tin plate! Work ‘em 16 hours
a day on a chaingang, I say. That’d show ‘em not ta break the law.”

“They’re just teenagers, Hays, they’re kids,” the Chief said. “Ya
don’t
punish
kids nowadays, ya rehabileritate ‘em.”
“Shee-it,” Hays smirked. “Ya ask me, turn this place into a
county butt-whuppin’ house, that’s the way. First offense, give ‘em a
two-by-four shampoo, second offense bust some bones. They’ll get
the message. Or like Claude said, throw ‘em in the county slam, let
‘em git their butts plumbed raw fer a couple weeks straight. Cain’t
sell drugs or rob folks when you’re walkin’ funny. Yeah, Chief, ya
ask me—”
“Well, I
didn’t
ask ya so
shut up!
” The Chief’s booming drawl
rocketed down the hallway. “We’se gotta find a detention officer, find
out what’s goin’ on.”
The end of the next hall took ‘em to a big set of double doors
and a sign: GYMNASIUM. “Shee-it, Chief, I shore hope we’se
ain’t interruptin’ their volleyball game, ‘cos these poor boys have
the right ta rehabileritation.” Hays chuckled. “Yes sir, sounds like
a suppression of Constitutional rights fer a bunch’a little robbers’n
rapists ta not git their proper exercise’n fun.” But when Hays pushed
open them double doors, he just stood’n stared, and the Chief did likewise.
“Well shit my shorts,” Hays uttered.
“Fuck,” Kinion responded.
What faced them was no doubt the bizarrest thang either of ‘em had ever
saw. Each and every single teenage resident of the County
Watch-House fer Boys—all thirty of ‘em mind you—lay side by
side on the gym floor in a single line, and the three staff detention
officers lay right along with ‘em. Yes sir, a line of fellas from one
end’a the gym to the other.

And if that weren’t odd enough, this next fact might shorely
be. Each and every one of ‘em had their pants pulled down to their
ankles’n odder still was that their peckers was all stickin’ up hard as
rocks. That’s right, what Hays’n the Chief stood starin’ at was a row
of exactly thirty-three hard dicks, all shapes’n sizes.

But not one of these fellas was movin’, not at all, like they was all
lyin’ there on the floor next ta each other and were asleep or—
“Shee-it, Hays,” Kinion fretted. “Are they—are they
dead?
”
“Not unless the dead can have wood, Chief. I mean, look! They
alls got boners!”
“I can see that, Hays . . . Go check.”
Hays looked at his boss. “Check what? Their boners?”
“NO NOT THEIR BONERS GOD DAGGIT! CHECK TO
SEE IF THEY’RE ALIVE!”
With a tremor from the Chief’s explodin’ voice, Hays set out ta
do as instructed, leanin’ over each kid’n checkin’ fer pulse. “They’se
all alive, boss. Somethin’ musta knocked ‘em all unconscious.”
“Slap one around, wake him up.”
Hays grabbed one pimply faced kid by the collar’n shook him,
then laid a few backhands across the kisser.
Slap! Slap! Slap!
Nothin’.
“These kids is all out stone cold, Chief, and the detent officers
too! And, come on over here. There’s somethin’ else . . .”
Something else? Thirty kids’n three adults lyin’ unconscious in a row with their hard-ons out? What else
could
there be?
Kinion
walked behind the row of unconscious boys where he could now see
their faces.

Hays was right. Another oddity remained.
They all had great big smiles on their faces.
And in less than a second later, them double doors
barged
open.

“State Health Department!” some fella in a crewcut and ambuhlance suit barked out. “Make way!”
At least two dozen more fellas, then, trotted into the gym, bearin’
stretchers which they’se quickly dropped, rolled a kid on, then carried
back out.
The Chief scratched his bald head. “State Health Department?”
“How in the hail did they even know to come here?”
They followed the line of stretcher-bearing men, back out to
the front’a the facilerty, and that’s where they saw two bigass buses
with the State Health Department logo on ‘em. All them fellas was
quickly loadin’ them unconscious boys unto the buses.
“This don’t make no sense, Hays.” Kinion’s head flashed in the
sun.
“Somebody must’ve seen that gym before we did, Chief, and
then called these state health fellas.”
“Yeah, but who?”
A slim shadow crossed their backs. “It was me.”
Kinion and Hays jerked around at the voice—
“
I
called them, Chief Kinion,” Captain Majora informed them.

To commit what might be deemed an incongruenty within the
parameters of structural and/or editorial protocol, here we now
discover a violation in the standard and accepted acknowledgement
that when an author composes, say, 16,000 words of a novella told
entirely from a third-person-limited point of view . . .

Art Koll pushed himself up from the
meeting table, a formidable
feat being that he weighed a solid 300 pounds. He wore the buzzcut
and chiseled face quite appropriately as perhaps the most outspoken
member of VFW Post 3063, outspoken in that he eagerly spoke out
against homos, lesbos, freakos, pervertos, pinkos, druggos, and any
other denomination that sought to undermine the moral fabric of
this grand country. And the kids, Jesus! Look at the kids these days!
Devil tattoos’n all these metal gewgaws in their faces and t-shirts
with serial-killers on ‘em or pictures’a Jesus shootin’ up drugs.
Just last year he’d flown all the way out to Frisco to attend the 30th
reunion of Alpha Company, 2/81st, 1st Armored Division, of which
he’d been a proud Sheridan M551 loader during the Big One: Viet
Nam, and he’d stood right up in front of all surviving 16 members
and proclaimed into the microphone: “Like the great Mac said, ‘Old
soldiers never die!’ Shee-it, men, thirty years ago we was fightin’ fer
the freedom of our children, and look what our children become!
Boys wearin’ lipstick’n dresses, gals shavin’ their heads! Fer lunch
today I walked just downtown in this fucked-up freako city and
I’se swear I couldn’t tell the boys from the girls. All freako tattoos
with upside-down sataneric crosses on ‘em, rivets in their tongues’n
nails’n fish hooks in their faces, and hair stickin’ out the color’a
Kool-Aid! And I’se wearin’, quite proudly, my M551 shirt which
reads HANOI OR BUST, and some boy with yellow hair’n blue
lipstick’n what looked like shower curtain rings in his ears walks
up ta me in a black dress’n says, ‘Guess you went bust, huh,
babykiller!’ so’s instead’a cleanin’ his fruito perverto clock, I said,
‘We
shorely
would’a
made it ta Hanoi if we’d had a coupla you fellas in
the field with us ‘cos then Charlie Com would take one look at’cha
and they’d be bent over laughin’ so hard we could’a benchmarked
all their dink asses and won the fuckin’ war in one day!’ So then this
thing in the dress kinda goes
hummph
the way a gal does when she knows she’s wrong, and then it says ‘Yeah but you baby-killers
didn’t
win the war,’ and then he whips out his compact and starts fixin’ his
lipstick, so’s I say ‘Listen, sister, we may’ve failed in achievin’ our
primary objecterive of keepin’ the good people of South Vietnam
out’a the clutchers of Commurnism only because we had a bunch’a
pinkos in the White House’n fuckin’ Congress, but we shore as
hail
didn’t lose that war. The dinks killed 58,000 of us but we scratched
two million
of their gook asses and we blowed the arms or legs of
half a million more and turned their entire road system into craters
that they
still
ain’t been able ta fix and we defolierated half their
farmland with good ‘ol Agent Orange and they
still
cain’t grow
nothin’ there, so you tell me we
lost?
We kicked the rice out’a those
dink motherfuckers so hard they’se
still
seein’ stars, and you know
why, girlie? To show the world that the United States of America will
challenge any diabolical plot to spread Commernism inta the free
world and looks what happens, Susy, like right now there ain’t no
Commernism at all ‘cept in fuckin’China’n North fuckin’Korea and
a coupla other dink hell-holes, and the whole lot of ‘em cain’t even
make it no more without the financial investerments from
us!
And
it’s a dang good thang we fought that war ‘cos if we hadn’t, Betty,
you shore as shit wouldn’t be standin’ here with hair the color of a
fuckin’canary’n wearin’lipstick and a fuckin’dress’n havin’enough
metal in yer face to fill a tacklebox, nor would you even be able to
exercise yer freedom’a speech ‘cos there wouldn’t
be
none, Harriet!
You’d be in some fruit camp somewhere eatin’ tree bark and shit’n
bent over plantin’ rice fer the Commissar!’”