Dead Nolte (3 page)

Nolte had made it perfectly clear; to his senseless
stepdaughters, that time was of the essence when it came to getting his ass in
the ground. They had asked why, of course, but he had explained to them, in no
uncertain terms, that they were too stupid to comprehend his reasons. Beyond
that, as a means to further ensure he was interred in a timely manner, he had
shown both of them, his will. It stipulated, his funeral was to be no later
than three days, precisely seventy-two hours after his death, or they would get
nothing. Their greed would get him in the ground on time.

Greed was a friend of Nolte’s. He knew how to exploit it,
and could wield a person’s love of money against them, like a weapon, if the
circumstance called for battle, but more often than not, it only required bait.
However, greed had no intimate ties to Nolte; he neither loved money, nor
fancied a large quantity of it, and was especially proud of how little command
it had over him. He might admit to being greedy for pussy, but that was
instinctual, a built-in mechanism to propagate the species, and also, because
he was a man’s man.
It’s
what men did, men got pussy,
and that, was no doubt, something to be proud of.

He would see about getting some pride back once he was
risen. It was hard for him to think about pride, with the echoes of bitch-like,
girly screams ringing in his head.

Nolte looked around the darkness, it was a strange
sensation. There was no feeling in his limbs, other than they felt like they
existed. There was nothing to measure movement by, using sight, so looking
around felt more like a thought, than an action. He had often wondered about
true sensory deprivation, as a means of breaking the will of a person, as it
would apply to others, of course. He told himself it was a matter of innocent
curiosity and thought the information might come in handy, should the need to
calm an unruly captive ever presented itself.

If the darkness he found himself languishing in was any
indication of true sensory deprivation, the evidence was clear, and he was
sure, he would be a babbling fucking idiot after three days, and quite serene,
if not completely tranquilized by insanity, upon his release.

As Nolte tried to resign himself to three days of abysmal
darkness and mind numbing silence, the silence crackled. There was a slight
tremor, through which he heard a soft warbling. It was the voice of a small
child, small and far away, as it would sound, delivered through two tin cans on
a string. He cocked his head or did something that felt like cocking his head
and listened intently. He could definitely hear something; the shadow must have
found him. Suddenly, a crackle of electricity and the sound filled his head to
bursting.

“…for Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory.
Forever, and ever. Amen.”

The darkness was gone. Nolte found himself standing in his
living room, near the spot where he had died; Martha was kneeling next to his
dead body. The shade of blue his skin had turned, unnerved him a bit.

The old saying was true, he thought, there is no dignity in
death. He looked like hammered shit, lying there on the floor, his mouth gaped
open with a fat tongue poking out. The tongue didn’t even look like it belonged
to him, it was too big, could be, it was his lung. He appeared to be blowing a
bubble, with gray bubblegum. His fingers were pinched together, and his hands
curled back sharply at the wrist, as though he had died in the middle of shadow
puppets, swans, possibly ostriches.

A big blue pile of hammered shit, he thought. He didn’t have
all the details on how this living forever was going to work out, but he
couldn’t see how the body on the floor, was going to be of any use, it appeared
to be fucked-up-beyond-all-recognition.

Martha rocked back on her heels and stared at Nolte’s blue
body, she had her hands together in front of her, as she peeled off another Our
Father. He smiled at the realization. The churchy bitch had prayed his ass back
from limbo, or wherever the hell he was just at, three days early. He was ahead
of schedule! There was no need for some hypocritical man of the cloth to say
the magic words, he had the churchy bitch.

Nolte took a quick inventory of himself. Two arms, two legs,
and a head, all attached to a naked body in a soggy diaper. He must have pissed
himself when he popped over from the other side. How fucking wonderful, he thought,
still incontinent, at least he wasn’t blue. He was the spitting image of the
blue thing laying on the floor, only with a little more spring in his step. It
wasn’t the twenty-something stud body he’d been hoping for, but it was better
than the piece of shit the churchy bitch was trying to bring back to life.

If everything worked out as planned, he would see about
doing a little potty training and getting rid of the diaper, but until he put a
few miles on the new body, it was better to be safe, than sorry. He didn’t want
to run around in haunting mode with shit dripping down his legs, he might
chafe. His situation wasn’t perfect, but it was only a matter of time, and he
would be shitting in tall cotton, diaper be damned.

“What up bitch? Look who ‘s home!” he yelled at Martha. She
had stopped trying to revive Nolte with pleas to the Almighty and was starting
to tidy the crime scene. She screwed the cap back on the mostly empty mescal
bottle and pushed it beneath the couch. Nolte’s sudden appearance in the room
drew no reaction from her. “Church bitch, hand me that bottle!” he waved,
fanning his hand next to her ear and snapping his fingers. Martha remained
oblivious to him. He took a step back, scratching his ragged beard, “What the
fuck?” he thought, this was going to suck if he couldn’t fuck with people.

Maybe the witch had been wrong about the ‘haunting’ part.
She had told him, whoever he let touch the coin, would tie to it and be able to
hear his voice from beyond. Once convinced they weren’t, as she put it, “crazy
as a shithouse rat with voices in its head”, they could be used as ‘helpers’,
while he hung in limbo.

Nolte had decided to set up his helpers the day of Mommy’s
funeral. The reality of her being gone for good, reminded him that his days were
also numbered, and he needed to get some stuff ready before it was too late. He
didn’t see how Team Retard could be of any real use, but the idea of crawling
around in their empty heads had really appealed to him.

“Hey, stupid bitch, this is your god speaking. I command you
to put a spit shine on my jimmy!”

Something was wrong. Weak-minded Martha should be curled up
in the fetal position, screaming for her savior, and confessing stigmata. Maybe
they hadn’t held on to the coin long enough, maybe he should have had them rub
it like a genie lamp.

The cunt wouldn’t touch the coin, Nolte remembered, it came
to him through his margarita memory, he hadn’t been able to get the prissy
bitch to touch the coin. She had recoiled from it like it had been a penis
shaped penis. She wasn’t a team player. Team Retard was down one.

“Wanna sharpen my pencil fer me, you dumb fucking
hickerbilly?” he tried again, using her native drawl, willing her to hear him,
but Martha didn’t flinch.

She reached under the couch cushion where Nolte always sat
and pulled out the wallet he kept hidden there. Digging behind his credit and
preferred shopper cards with a familiarity that unsettled the old man, she
flipped up the flap to the so-called ‘secret compartment’ and removed the five
hundred dollars he had squirreled away for emergencies and such.

Statutory rape was not a term Nolte liked to hear or use, in
fact, he thought it to be entirely unconstitutional, but since it remained on
the books, he kept spare cash on hand. In a land where justice prevails, so
too, should common sense. Just because mommy and daddy didn’t want to fuck,
they shouldn’t be able to deprive their little sweetheart of that inalienable
right. There was a time, if memory served him, when twelve year olds were
married off to the neighbor with the biggest herd or the most acreage, Nolte
thought the age of consent would be best for all concerned, if left up to the
young thing in question.

Fathers of almost legal pussy, almost always lacked a sense
of humor, and in light of this shortcoming, Nolte often found it in his best
interest to pop out of town for a few days, every now and then, and his Mad
Daddy Money made it possible. How in the fuck did Sister Show-n-Tell know about
it?

“You thieving fucking cunt!” Nolte exclaimed. “You snoopy,
kleptomaniacal fucking cunt!” He was beside himself at the blatant larceny
going on, right before his eyes. Some fucking church lady you turned out to be,
he thought. “Thou shall not fucking steal,
you
cunt!”

Martha carefully pressed the cards back into place and slid
the wallet back between the cushions. She stood and walked across the room to
the phone. Glancing back at Nolte’s cold blue body on the floor, she dialed
911.

Had he stuck around, he would have seen Martha cry as she
made the call, but Nolte was already on his way upstairs to check on his nest
egg, thinking he’d better get there before the sticky-fingered cunt did. The
tear that slowly rolled down Martha’s cheek was the only true tear that would
be shed over Nolte’s death.

Atop his gun cabinet, sat a ceramic frog. From below, it
didn’t look like it had been moved. Nolte scooted his desk chair over and
climbed up to examine the ugly knick-knack. He had chosen this curio
specifically because he thought no one would want the damn thing.

It smiled from ear to ear, with what Nolte referred to as
Alabama blue-gum lips, and was hand painted in the likeness of Al Jolsen. As
racist an item as one would find in any curio shop, that specialized in Klan
memorabilia, but just old enough to be labeled as Folk Americana, so that
blue-haired antique hunters might haggle over it shame free. Nolte knew no
blue-haired antique hunters, so his most valuable item was hidden, right out in
front of God and everybody.

On the bottom, under the duct tape he had used to secure it,
he could see the outline of the coin, his nest egg, his ticket to eternal life.
Even beneath the scuffed tape, the relief it presented was beautiful. Nolte
peeled back the tape and ran his finger over the coin. A copper tasting jolt of
electricity shot through him, and in an instant, he found himself, once again
swallowed by thick impenetrable darkness.

Nolte screamed, the little coward screamed, the primal
infant screamed, but the sound was once again, only in his head. “What in the
fuck did I just do?” He tried to think of some way he could blame Martha and
her thieving ways, but the metallic taste was still in his mouth, establishing
responsibility. “I thought I was ahead of schedule!” His scream filled his
mouth but went no further. “Fuck your rules!” He screamed at God. Now, what the
fuck was going to happen to him? Was he stuck here for eternity? Where are his
helpers? The shadow is going to find him; of that he was certain. Nolte felt a
tug.

He popped free of the void, and again, Nolte found himself
staring down at his bubble-blowing, blue corpse. “Oh thank God. Thank you,
thank you, thank you,” he muttered, on the verge of what most would recognize
as blithering idiocy, giving thanks to the same deity he had just told to fuck
off.

Nolte did a quick pat down, taking inventory of limbs. “I’m
done fucking around.” He decided from then on, he would follow the witch’s
instructions to the letter. Attention to detail was the order of the day. The
bitch had told him, his body had to be in the ground before he could finish her
spell. He had invested too much time and effort into this plan, he wasn’t going
to fuck this up; in three days he would literally have all the time in the
world. He could wait.

Martha was no longer in the room. “Shit!” Nolte ran back
upstairs, in order to thwart the dishonest bitch from further thievery.

The frog lay on the floor at the base of the gun cabinet.
Martha was absent; Nolte assumed she was in some other part of the house
looking for things, with which to fill her pockets. He approached the racist,
amphibian with caution. Instead of picking it up, he knelt beside it, and with
the careful hands of a brain surgeon, making sure he didn’t touch the coin
itself, pushed the duct tape neatly back into place. Glancing over his shoulder
to ensure Martha wasn’t staking out another robbery, he climbed back up the
chair and put the frog back in its place. He patted the grinning ceramic on the
head, “I’ll be back my precious.”

E
ven though he had almost screwed the
pooch, Nolte marveled at himself and his most ingenious plan. How God decided
who goes up and who goes down, was beyond Nolte, he had assumed it was merit
based, and up until a few hours ago, he had always held out a little hope, that
God liked him, but that did not seem to be the case.

Televangelists, the hickerbilly sisters, even road signs,
all proclaimed the availability of forgiveness and mercy, and to Nolte all that
shit seemed fine and dandy, but with all things considered, his history, even
in the most favorable lighting, didn’t have much of a shine to it. Though he
tried not to dwell on the thought too much, it had always been in the back of
his mind that the fires of hell were in his future.

It wasn’t the brightest of futures, but what was a man to
do? Fall to his knees and swear fealty to some cloud king, a dude that probably
had never tasted pussy? Then what? Walk around the rest of his life, grinning
like an idiot, vomiting ‘Praise be’ and ‘Bless you’? Not him, he had some
fucking pride, thank you very much. So what to do? What do stubborn fools,
facing an eternity adrift on the lake of fire, do? They get fire insurance.

When the hooker in the French Quarter told him of a witch
who could turn men into women, old men into little boys and raise the dead, a
brilliant idea had formed in his head. When shitheads die they go to hell, the
key word being, die, so to remedy that bullshit, Nolte decided he would live
forever. If the hooker’s witch could raise the dead, surely, it was feasible
she could fiddle with the infinite, perhaps, tweak his time a tad.

Nolte was always coming up with brilliant ideas and dazzling
plans that boggled his mind and this one was brilliant with a capital B. It was
right up there on par with sliced bread and the self-flushing toilet. Even
though none of his brilliant ideas and dazzling plans had ever reached
fruition, or even the drawing board, to be honest, he had high hopes for this
one. However, there was one catch, though the hooker had nice tits, she was
nuttier than squirrel shit.

Her story had sounded convincing enough, she had even
produced a pickle jar with a dick in it, which she swore up and down, used to
be hers. Nolte thought the thing looked more like two turkey gizzards; pickled
in rancid piss than a willy-johnson, but he had humored her. If it was a real
pecker, it probably belonged to the last john who tried to leave without
paying. Nolte had been born at night, but it wasn’t last night, nonetheless, he
wanted to meet her witch.

Common sense viciously attacked his high hopes. Along with
neck hair, Nolte relied heavily on common sense but was reluctant to let go of
a dream without thorough scrutiny. Common sense told him, if someone had found
a way to raise the dead, he would have heard about it on television, on the
nightly news. The most astounding breakthrough in modern science wouldn’t have
come to him, by way of a fifty-dollar prostitute who advertises her former
masculinity with a dick in a jar display. No one could reverse the aging
process, if someone could, Oprah would have had them on her show and Dr. Phil
would have been sent packing.

Common sense was winning. It wasn’t until she showed him the
room with the boy and the old man, did Nolte become convinced that at least some
of what she was saying might be true.

***

A
n obese white man sat in a tattered
Lazy-boy in the center of the room. A fat banker type, who probably ate Doritos
and worked foreclosures, was Nolte’s immediate assessment. A reading lamp arched
over the back of the chair, its wrinkled shade directed light through a small
cloud of mosquitos and gnats, illuminating what, on closer examination, looked
to be a very sick man. He was sweating profusely on account he was fat and it
was Louisiana in the summer, but he appeared to be panting out a heart attack.

Fat men and N’awlins’ summers have long been sworn enemies,
but it had been Nolte’s observation that the two were as inseparable as farts
and black beans. Admittedly stereotypical and a full-blooded racist, Nolte was
willing to bet one couldn’t fling a bowl of jambalaya in July in the French
Quarter, without hitting a fat banker with a shrimp. It was even odds on
whether the fat man’s suit would be white, or powder blue.

This banker was naked, whether or not he was, for sure, in
foreclosures was indeterminable without further inquiry, as the fat man’s suit
was nowhere to be seen.
 
Nolte’s
attention was more focused on the two black women who were tending to the fat
man. One knelt between his legs with a basin of water, humming softly as she
washed the man’s dome of a belly, the other combed clumps of gray hair from his
scalp. Nolte wished he had known this was on the menu, he liked a bit of brown
sugar now and then.

“Go look, motherfucker, see if I ain’t telling you the
truth.” The hooker crossed her arms in front of her defiantly. “The only time I
lied to you, was when I told you your dick was big.”

Nolte entered the room and walked over to the chair. The
kneeling woman leaned to one side so he could better see what was going on. The
fat man appeared to be fighting for air, his big gut heaving with each
spittle-spraying gasp he took. Protruding from the man’s belly fat was the
lower half of a black infant. The rest of the child, from just below the arms
and up, was somehow embedded in the man.

The woman dipped her washcloth in the basin and gently
washed the baby’s bottom; its tiny legs scraped at folds of flesh, as it tried
to gain a foothold in the banker’s sweat slick stomach. Where the man and baby
were connected, the skin was seamless and smooth. The only separation appeared
to be where the different skin colors mingled and blended sharply. Nolte had
seen some crazy, fucked up shit in his life, but this just topped the list.

Nolte looked from the helpless baby to the man’s greasy
face; the fat fuck looked up at him.

“I think it’s working.” The fat banker stammered and formed
a half-hearted smile.

“What do you think is working?” Nolte asked. “You have a
fucking nigger kid sticking out of your gut, is that what’s working?”

“You should have seen that motherfucker this morning, he was
eighty years old.” The crazy hooker said as she moved next to Nolte. “He start
suckin’ at that baby at the crack of dawn. He’ll be done in a few more hours.
The younger he
get
, the faster he can suck it up.”

Nolte’s eyes darted back to the baby, to look for stitches.
There was no way this was real, he was born at night, but… “What in the fuck do
you mean, he’s suckin’ it up?”

“He’s absorbin’ the youth of the young’un, maybe you should
do this.” The hooker smiled. “Then you get hard ones a cat can’t scratch, yes?”

Had Nolte, any sense of decency, her nonchalant attitude,
concerning his cock and the death of a child, would have appalled him, instead,
his high hopes were back. A chill ran up his spine, this is the stuff dreams
were made of.

Nolte ignored her, the sight before him had him sickly
amazed. He couldn’t take his eyes off of what was happening. It was like a car
crash with multiple fatalities strewn about; something deep inside you made you
look and kept you looking.

He had seen his first kid being born, and had decided the
so-called ‘miracle of life’ wasn’t all that miraculous, but this shit was
amazing…a real miracle of life.

Over the next four and a half hours, Nolte watched the
unholy spectacle, as intently as a copperhead might watch a drunken mouse
stumble by. Inch by inch, the fat banker’s pus-gut slowly devoured the baby.
The hooker having gotten bored and annoyed at the lack of attention she was
receiving, left after half an hour claiming she’d seen the process too many
times to feign interest in it again. She informed everyone, as she excused
herself, that her pussy wasn’t going to sell itself.

The normality of the ordeal and the casual familiarity of
the ‘attendants’ actions inspired Nolte, professionalism might have come to
mind, had the room not been filthy and reeking of piss.

The two worked on the man cheerfully, dapping at sweat and
periodically giving him sips of water from a sticky looking glass (that Nolte
wouldn’t consider using to wash his scrotum), with no apparent empathy for the
baby, who was now, nothing more than two small feet protruding from the fat
banker, who was
more flabby
, than fat at this point.
Nolte had thought about asking where the kid came from but realized he probably
didn’t really want to know. However, he did ask the fat man what he did for a
living.

“Exotic cars.” He said, instinctively reaching for a
business card, too late to remember he was naked. He played it off by
scratching his nipple. So much for the foreclosure theory, Nolte thought.

As the soles of the baby’s feet faded and the soul of the
baby was recycled, a young man’s face sat atop stretched slabs of skin layered
like unspooled bolts of white man fabric. The car salesman, who resembled a
banker, looked years younger than he had when Nolte had first entered the room.
He now looked to be in his early thirties, though his skin hung off his frame
like wet towels draped over a clothesline, he no longer looked sickly. There
were fresh wisps of blonde hair in scattered patches around his head. His face,
except for some light stubble, was as smooth as the baby’s butt; he had just
sucked into his stomach. If the man had any remorse for the child’s life he had
just robbed, the youthful smile on his face betrayed it.

“I feel like a million bucks.”

“You sit tight, pretty Boss, Doc be here tomorrow to take
you in, a notch. Right now, you look like you wearin’ a parachute.”

 
“Hey ladies, what
else can this witch do?” The two women stopped washing the man in the chair and
looked up at Nolte; both wore the same big grin.

“What do you need, Sugar?”

“I need a life insurance policy.”