Dead Nolte (4 page)

A
lice
loved day drinking, morning drinking to put a finer point on it. She liked to get
a few in her and get the warmth flowing before her other senses had a chance to
completely awaken. This allowed each sense to face the day in a much better
mood than they might have, stone sober.

She had just gotten started in earnest when she received the
call about Nolte. She had been sipping and wondering about the buttery goodness
of beer, as she often did during her first few beers when her sister had called
with the disturbing news, but truth be told, being told of Nolte's long-awaited
demise did nothing but enhance the buttery flavor.
 
She did, however, feel a smidge guilty over
the momentary joy the news had raised in her. Usually, any interruptions to her
early morning buttery contemplations would have immediately turned her into a
bitch on wheels, but this news seemed to have a buttery flavor, all its own.
With that being said, she realized she would have to mourn soon in spite of all
things buttery.

Of course Alice knew there wasn’t any butter in beer, she
had read the list of ingredients on the side of the can many times and butter
was never listed, but she could taste it. It was probably just some magical
reaction with the chemicals. Alice was no scientist, but she was well aware of
magical reactions and how mysterious they could be, one of her fondest memories
was a scientific wonder, a vinegar and baking soda volcano she had made in
school. She didn’t understand it then, nor did she understand it today, but she
respected it. She knew there was no butter in beer, but that made it all the more
special in her book. Two or more ingredients not found in butter, mixed
together, more likely than not, by accident, in the olden days, had created a
buttery flavor. Some of the more amazing scientific discoveries of all time had
been accidents, though, she couldn’t remember the details, she was pretty sure
Henry Ford discovered the car on accident.
 

 
She found it odd that
she was the only person, that she could name, who could taste the flavor of
butter, because it was there, sure as sunshine. She knew it didn’t take a rock
scientist to understand what taste buds were saying.

It gave Alice great pleasure to contemplate such mysteries,
and this was one of her favorites, but now wasn’t the time for pleasurable
reflection on scientific wonders and magical reactions, Nolte was dead. Now was
a time for sadness and mourning. It was a time for contemplating one’s own
mortality; it was also time for another beer.

“Ding dong, the witch is dead. Long live the witch!”

Alice had been waiting for this day for a very long time. It
had, in fact, been such a long time coming, that she had actually begun to
think that Nolte had cut a deal with the devil, somehow managing to turn
terminal cancer into a nothing more than a chronic illness. To her dismay, he’d
beaten the odds and made it several months past the three to four, the doctors
had given him. Even the doctors were baffled by his defiance of their
prognosis; one had even mentioned to her, that his drinking alone should have
killed him. It was like he had been flat out refusing to die, just to make
Alice miserable.

There had been times when the waiting had become unbearably
frustrating. More than once, the thought of slipping the asshole a little
something, that might help him along, had crossed her mind. Just a bit of a
nudge to help nature take its course, nothing sinister or devious, just a bump
in the right direction, but the thought of prison terrified her. The caretaker
was always the one; cops focused their brutal interrogations on first, right
after the immediate family, of course. She happened to be both. This was not an
unfounded concern, due to the amount of crime television Alice digested on a
daily basis; she was quite familiar with the method of operations homicide
detectives employed.

Though the hands-on caretaking had fallen mostly on her
sister’s shoulders, since Martha lived closer to Nolte, Alice felt her
contributions were not without merit, as far as caretaking was concerned. She
had lent a great deal of emotional support to Nolte via phone calls, and that,
in and of itself, could be construed as evidence of foul play. The
penitentiaries were full of hapless murderers, foolish enough to leave a phone
record trail for the cops to follow.

Perhaps it was paranoia or oversimplification on her part,
it really made no difference, Alice knew in her heart of hearts, if the old
fool was found belly up, the investigators would be able to sense her guilt and
with their gut instincts alone, have enough to haul her off to the crowbar
hotel. They would skip right over church lady Martha, and slap the cuffs on
Alice so fast her head would spin. A quick stop at the courthouse to pick up a
guilty verdict, and then off to prison where fat black women would rape her
with a broom, she couldn’t risk it; the thought of prison terrified her. The
thought of fat black women terrified her.

Oh well, who cares? None of that mattered now that the big
day had finally arrived. That sorry sonofabitch was no more, he was worm food.
No more middle of the night ‘Nolte’ calls, to ask if her pussy was lonely and
in need of some company. No more fabricated complaints: someone was putting
Kleenex in the lint basket, someone was putting lint in the Kleenex basket,
someone had put the beer on the second shelf of the fridge, someone was drinking
his mescal, or he was pitching a tent in his diaper and wanting her to go
camping with him. The man was shameless, insane and completely void of any
moral values. Creepy and filled to the brim with shit and nasty, was what he
was. Not nasty in an unclean way, but unclean in a nasty way.

None of that mattered now, the fat lady had sung, and Nolte
was gone, pushing up daisies. He’s off to face the music. She’d hate to be in
his shoes right now. She took a long slug of her beer and smiled at the thought
of Satan castrating Nolte with toenail clippers. Maybe Satan would mouth rape
Nolte with his devil dick. Alice jerked her mind out of the fantasy and scolded
herself. A good person wouldn’t think these things; a good person would feel
grief. Suddenly Alice felt guilty for not feeling guilty and for her
unChristian thinking.
 
She also felt the
hint of a beer buzz coming on. She chugged the rest of the beer and belched a
bubbly hiss, through closed lips.

Alice thought hard, she knew that if she really put her mind
to it, she was capable of feeling bad. Deep down, she was sure there was some
sort of grief buried beneath the relief she felt. There had to be, she wasn’t a
heartless bitch. She cried at the right places in movies and worried about the
homeless when it got really cold out. There weren’t any homeless where she
lived, so she worried from afar, and that had to be worth more than up close
worrying. It stood to reason, that since she had overcome the mental obstacle
of out of sight, out of mind, a greater value should be placed on her worries,
than regular worries. The grief was there somewhere, she was sure of it, it
probably had a big scientificated name that she didn’t know, was all.

After some deep introspective thought, another beer, and a
quick search of her soul, she had decided she did have some grief, it wasn’t
much, but it was there all the same. It wasn’t ‘curl up in a ball and cry
yourself to sleep’ stuff, but Alice felt it qualified as grief and or sorrow.
It was really more along the lines of sadness, like the sadness she felt when
the neighbor’s dog was run over. What she felt on that particular day, might
have been grief and or sorrow, it was, she finally concluded, definitely grief
and sadness. It had been the deep kind which, really hurt badly.

Scout the dog, had been sunning himself against the curb,
most likely in peaceful buttery slumber when the mail lady backed over him in
her mail jeep.

Alice had secretly despised mail jeeps, long before the day in
question, every time she had seen one prior to, or after that fateful day, she
would say to herself, “There’s an accident waiting to happen, the damn steering
wheel is on the wrong side.” Even though she couldn’t prove it, she was sure
the wrong-sided steering wheel was in play when Scout met with his demise.

She had seen the tragedy happen up close and personal and
was standing over Scout when the dog took its last breath. Scout had begged
her, with sad and frightened eyes, for help, but there was nothing she could
do, other than hysterical screaming and blind panic, she had limited experience
in dealing with sudden tragedy.

Sometimes she would dream about that horrible day. In her
dreams, it’s the mail lady screaming hysterically and Alice is the one kneeling
beside Scout, stroking his fur, and gently coaxing him toward the light. She is
the one who had told him, that it was okay to pass on and how wonderful puppy
heaven would be, where ancestor dogs chase an abundant supply of bunnies
through tall grasses. In this version of what happened, she also takes the mail
lady’s hand and comforts her, assuring her that it wasn’t her fault.

Of course, she had done none of those things on the day the
dog lay dying at her feet, in fact, she had repeatedly screamed—almost chanted—
“You ran over Scout,
you
stupid cunt!” In fact, she
had not rendered any form of comfort or aid, but she felt she would have, had
she not been in shock over the traumatic event. Sometimes in her dreams, it
wasn’t the mail lady driving, but Alice, and it wasn’t the neighbor’s dog
Scout, but the kid from across the street. Alice took a big gulp of beer to
wash the dog and the kid out of her head.

The memory of the dying dog caused her to re-evaluate the
grief she felt for Nolte, and after careful contemplation, she realized she was
mistaken, she, felt no grief for Nolte, none at all. As a matter of fact, she
felt the angel of death had finally stilled the hands of perversion and for
that, she was grateful and truly happy.

Alice was quite sure; Nolte never had a passing thought,
without some deviate act, or perverse behavior, or sinister motive attached to
it, so there probably has never been a more justifiable case of good riddance,
than the death of Nolte, that’s what Alice thought.

The angel of death had finally stilled the hands of perversion;
the nasty old man had not only been quick with his paws but was as skilled in
the art of ‘sleight of hand’ as any magician. He could have fingered Mother
Teresa to orgasm, in full view of the pope, before she even realized her
panties were missing.

For as far back as Alice cared to remember, the pervert had
grabbed her ass and pinched her nipples, every chance he got. The entirety of
her adolescence was accompanied by the after-burn of a tweaked nipple. Even
now, her skin crawled at the thought of his touch. Even though he lay safely
dead, on a cold slab, in a funeral home fifty miles away, her skin still
crawled. However, imagining Nolte’s cold dead body on a slab, brought with it
another twang of faux guilt, but this time, the twang was tinged with beer and
she felt less guilty, for not feeling guilty.

Alice took another swallow and tried again, to think of
something nice about the old man, after all, he was dead, and she’d been taught
one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. Maybe she had seen that in a movie. Well,
it matters little where it came from; to her, it seemed to be a sound
characteristic a person would do well to have, and to prove she really felt
that way, she would adopt it as one of her own. And so she did. She took
another swallow of beer to seal the deal and held the cool can to her forehead
to help her think.

There had to be one redeeming quality about the man. Even
with the coolness of the can helping her, she was drawing a blank; she could
come up with nothing. At least nothing that wouldn’t be considered nasty, when
compared to the moral standards of most social circles, who frown upon child
sacrifice.

Alice hadn’t been Nolte’s only pinch toy; her younger sister
Martha had actually been the first to draw his unwanted attentions. His eyes
would follow her ass every time she walked past and when she stopped moving, he
would stare openly at her boyish breasts. The man had no shame.

He was forever determined in his attempts to catch one of them
alone in a room, a mistake both girls had each made and tried never to repeat.
The two actually became quite adept at watching each other’s backs over the
years, a courtesy that quickly disappeared, as they went their separate ways in
adulthood. At this point in their lives, they were more than willing to throw
the other under the bus, if it measured out a few dollars.

Nolte’s first success came when Martha had forgotten to lock
the door to the bathroom behind her. The absence of the lock clicking into
place had caught Nolte’s attention immediately, and he had sprung to his feet
like his ass was on fire. He had closed the distance, from the couch to the
bathroom at the speed of light. Without so much as a look around for potential
witnesses, as silent as smoke, he’d poured himself through the door. Alice
could just see the surprise/horror on Martha’s face as Nolte quietly closed the
door behind him. The asshole could move like a cat, and this time, the lock did
click into place.

They were only in the bathroom for five minutes at the most.
Not much could happen in five minutes, Alice had thought, but the look on
Martha’s face, when she came out, told her a lot could happen in five minutes.
Bad things happen quickly. A few times she had asked Martha what had gone on,
but she never answered, she always shook her head and looked away, the last
time with tears in her eyes. Alice never asked again, instead she focused on
preventing her turn in the bathroom.

Her precautionary measures proved to be insufficient; Nolte
was almost superhuman in his quest for forbidden fruit. Someone had once told
Alice, that locks were only there to keep honest people honest. She found this
to be so true, a dishonest person didn't give a shit about locks. A butter
knife, a credit card, a bobby pin, Nolte could pick locks like a seasoned cat
burglar.