Dead Nolte (8 page)

To admit to himself that his body was failing, would be to
confess he wasn’t the man he once was. To acknowledge any sign of weakness
could be catastrophic to Nolte’s carefully constructed, emotional house of
cards. If it came crashing down, it would all go to hell in a hurry and quite
possibly result in an extended stay at the booby hatch. This is where his
‘constants’ and ‘boundaries’ came in handy.

Although he had become a death camp poster boy, one hundred
pounds of skin draped across gristle and bone, animated by a cold heart that
had completely turned to shit, Nolte still saw it as a temporary thing. In his
mind, it was a speed bump. He would slow his roll for a while and snap back
from this glitch as good as new, in fact, better than new. He would be twirling
his dick like a watch chain in no time. He would rock out, with his cock out.

Nolte saw himself as the man, the myth, the legend. Not the
shirtless, pot-bellied creepy guy in gym shorts, who wore white socks with
sandals.

In Nolte’s world, the sky was a different shade of blue. In
his world, he was stylin’ and profilin’. He drove a ‘Vette, for Christ’s sake,
as long as he kept his hair combed, his teeth brushed and his dick washed; any
woman in her right mind should and would feel privileged to find herself underneath
him. Even now, naked, except for an adult diaper and flip flops, he felt he
didn’t look half bad.

Hell, he must not be too far gone, he had been able to talk
his stepdaughter into a bit of a tug when she had stopped by to check his meds
and wash his crotch. He was pretty sure she would have sucked it too, if her
idiot husband, (goober, gomer, hickerbilly) hadn’t tagged along. Goober would
allow a tug here and there, but no pussy and nothing with the mouth.

Nolte knew this activity was only available to him because
of their greed, but he didn’t give a shit, a tug is a tug is a tug. Besides,
watching (goober, gomer, hickerbilly) squirm was actually more fun than the
tug, itself. It wasn’t that (goober, gomer, hickerbilly) liked the idea of
sharing his wife’s hand, but at the first sign of the old man’s sickness, it
had been made clear to him that Martha’s inheritance depended on Nolte’s
happiness and Nolte’s happiness depended on the occasional tug.

“No sex and no sucking.” Goober would say. This irritated
Nolte that the corn-fed country-fuck felt the need to establish these two
rules, prior to every tug. This also tickled Nolte, because what Goober didn’t
know, wouldn’t hurt Goober. Her mouth was only off limits when Goober was
there. Not that Goober’s feelings mattered to Nolte; in fact, he would try to
make the tug sessions as humiliating for the country boy as he possibly could,
by smiling at him the entire time. A big ol’, toothy grin fer Goober, Gomer,
Hickerbilly.

Goober wasn’t his real name, nor was it Gomer or
Hickerbilly, his real name was RJ, but to Nolte, he looked and acted like a
Goober, sometimes a Gomer and always a Hickerbilly. RJ so much fit Nolte’s idea
of a perfect Goober, that he had never bothered to find out what the initials
stood for, but Nolte would venture a wager that the J stood for Junior.

Nolte loved the feeling of power, Goober’s greed allowed him
to have over the young hillbilly, even more than Goober's wife’s absentminded
pulls on his dick. She wasn’t very good at it, so watching Goober’s
uncomfortable squirming was much more entertaining.

After several minutes of being stared at relentlessly,
Goober would usually grab the TV Guide and leaf through it. Nolte doubted the
shithead could read, so he figured the idiot probably just looked at the
pictures. Hell, he doubted the shithead could even spell his own name if you
gave him all the consonants and a two vowel head start. He knew for a fact,
Martha couldn’t. They could count dollars, though, and that was the crux of
Nolte’s power.

All in and the truth told, it wasn’t Nolte’s money they
wanted to get their hands on, it was Mommy’s money that they really wanted.
Nolte, as far as they knew, didn’t really have a pot to piss in, but he had
been the sole heir to Mommy’s estate, which consisted of the culminations of
the lifelong efforts of previous husbands.

Mommy had been an expert huntress, she could smell money on
a man and by the end of the hunt, she would have them field dressed and have
collected all useable and spendable parts, much like an Indian with a buffalo,
nothing went to waste. She harvested the skins of each of Nolte’s Uncle/Daddies
as if she were removing a financial pelt.

Mommy was a huntress, not to be confused with a black widow;
she never killed for money, though Nolte was sure many of his Uncle/Daddies had
prayed for death before Mommy had finished with them.

It’s not that Mommy wouldn’t kill; killing was not beneath
her at all. One Uncle/Daddy had mistakenly assumed he was a better hunter than
Mommy, and the hunter briefly became the hunted. On their wedding night,
Uncle/Daddy number three or four, in an unguarded, inebriated state, had
disclosed that he had spent the last of his money on the ‘rock’ that decorated
Mommy’s finger. Uneducated in annulments and such, Uncle/Daddy figured he was
protected by the ‘I do’s’ and even though he had not planned on letting his
financial cat out of the bag so soon, sometimes things slip on alcohol
moistened tongues.

There was no carnal bliss on Uncle/Daddy three or four’s
wedding night, for several hours Mommy had chased him around a bed and
breakfast in Texarkana, with a .38 caliber handgun. Although it concluded in a
standoff with police, there were no arrests and no charges filed, on account it
was their wedding night and the only person that got shot, was a cigar store
Indian, which Ma Kettle, half owner of Ma and Pa Kettle’s Bed and Breakfast,
had been after Pa to get rid of for years. The marriage was annulled and
Mommy’s bank account, filled with the hopes and dreams of previous
Uncle/Daddies, remained unmolested.

In a way, it was blood money they coveted, Martha, her
sister Alice and their idiot husbands. Blood, sweat and tear money. It wasn’t
enough to make the four of them wealthy, but it was enough to keep Nolte in
hand-jobs.

It appeared that neither one of them had been able to see
his Reaper when they’d stopped by, but it had watched both of them intently. It
had paid real close attention to the two of them, like one or both might be on
its short list. It might have been, since the ghost had come for Nolte, that it
could only be seen by him. It really didn’t matter one way or the other, even
if they had been able to see it, Nolte imagined, since both of them together
couldn’t figure out how a clothespin worked, there was no way they would be
able to wrap their minds around a supernatural fart cloud. They couldn’t find
their own ass with both hands and three tries, so he was sure that matters
concerning the hereafter and hypothetical thought, would have them completely
high-centered.

Goober had almost stepped on top of the thing when he had
gotten up to look for the TV Guide. The entire time his wife was wearing her
arm out on Nolte’s crotch, it had hovered beside RJ. Nolte had kept an even
closer eye on the country boy than usual, but he seemed entirely unaware of the
shit smell the thing next to him was puffing out. Creamed corn and musty trunk,
it puffed, and since the smell didn’t bring any horrors to mind for Nolte, he
assumed the farts were directed at Goober.

It didn’t really matter if they had seen it. Nothing would
change. Nolte was quite sure it wouldn’t be any more willing to cure stupid,
than cancer.

***

T
he last few hours, the shadow had peeped
at Nolte from around the doorway, as if it were playing some idiotic game of
hide and seek, where the mother hides from the baby behind her hands. The baby
knows that mom didn’t really disappear; it just gets a kick out of watching her
act stupid.

Most of the time, the Reaper had the patience of a stone,
letting off stink bombs at its leisure, but now, without fail, every time Nolte
closed his eyes or dozed off for a second, it would make a sound like course
sand being poured into a glass bowl and puff some stink out at him.

Nolte had gotten wise. When the sound woke him, he would
quickly pinch his nostrils and fan the shadow with the TV Guide. Though he
could still taste the smell, it helped put the brakes on the visions. He’d seen
enough of the horrible highlights of his past; the shadow could stick them up
his ass. What was the point of it, anyway? The past was over and done with;
there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it now. What was the point of
torturing him?

Lack of sleep was wearing him down, his head was thick and
his eyelids felt weighted. He had even tried sleeping with his eyes open. as a
kid, he’d heard that pirates were capable of open-eyed slumber, but Death kept
fucking with him. You can sleep when you’re dead, you can sleep when you’re
dead.

“Peek-a-Boo, I see you, motherfucker!” Nolte threw the TV
remote at the stink shadow when it poked out from behind the doorway. In his
weakened state, the remote had barely cleared the coffee table, but it was
enough to send the batteries flying and instantly piss off the shadow. The dark
cloud darted over and stopped directly across from him. Up close and personal,
Nolte could see that inside, it shimmered like heat spirits on a highway and
there was the sound of crackling electricity coming from the center of it.

“Half a fag cocksucker, you don’t scare me!” Nolte searched
the coffee table for something else to throw. He needed to save face. His girly
toss of the remote, combined with the fact that he had flinched when the thing
had bolted toward him, had alerted his inner coward. “Be careful, it might hurt
us!”

He reached for the copy of Good Housekeeping his
stepdaughter had left on the coffee table; Goober must have taken the TV Guide
with him. It was time to man up in the face of death, instead, he went limp. The
shadow had puffed directly into his face; the smell of stale shit filled his
nostrils to the point that they felt stretched. It was so thickly foul he could
taste it in his lungs. This time, there was no fucked-up memory or flashback.
This time, the smell was just because. The shadow was trying to show him who
was boss, by flexing its stink muscle.

“You don’t scare me, Chickenshit.” He said in a half
whisper. The urge to man up had passed and was quickly replaced by a tangible
emptiness that seemed to flow out of the shadow, and into him. The thing had
never been this close before. It had a peaceful calm inside it that Nolte could
actually feel himself wanting and it scared the shit out of him. “Go back in
the fucking kitchen.”

Too close for comfort and about to puke from the death fart,
Nolte pulled away from the shadow and flopped back onto the couch. Without
taking his eyes off the shit cloud, he dug around between the cushions; he
struggled, but he finally managed to dig out the fifth of mescal he kept hidden
there.

Old age and cancer didn’t play well together; any effort
seemed to wear his ass out. He pulled the bottle onto his lap and placed it
between his legs, staring at it while he caught his breath. The bottle was half
full or half empty, one of the two, he really didn’t give a fuck at this point.
He looked at the cap and found himself wondering how tight it was, dreading the
effort it might take to get it off. If he struggled with the cap, especially
after his ‘bitch throw,’ he was really going to look like a pussy in front of
the Reaper. Cancer sucked. Old age sucked. He told the little coward in his
head to go back to sleep. “I got this.” He mumbled.

He removed the cap slowly, making sure his face didn’t
display the exertion he was forced to use.

He thought about tossing the cap across the room and
slugging the shit right on down to the worm, like he would have done in his
prime, but the way he felt, he figured he’d be damn lucky just to get the
bottle up to his mouth. He slowed his breathing and peeled the oxygen hose from
his nostrils. He hung the tube on his ear and took a pull from the bottle. So
much for my fucking prime, he thought.

“Stupid bitch didn’t find this one.” He gave his shadow a
knowing nod and tried to grin as he shook off the first gulp willies. “Still
get the piss chills on the first swallar.” Nolte waited for the warmth of the
alcohol to make it down to his belly. He had always liked that part best. His
grin faded. “Want some, you stinkin’ sonofabitch?” he held the bottle out in
front of him, the neck tilted toward the ghost. “Come over here and polish my
knob for me and maybe I’ll let you have a taste.” Nolte tilted his face forward
and motioned down to his crotch with his eyes. He looked back at the shadow
from under his brow. “What? Does the diaper turn you off?”

Nolte winked and took a longer swig, the mescal dribbled
from his lip, tick, tick, ticking on the plastic crotch of his diaper. “Oopsie,
alcohol abuse.” He fumbled the cap back on the bottle and made a halfhearted
effort to hide it in the cushions. Hiding it one handed turned out to be harder
than he expected, he could feel the shadow judging him, wondering if he had a
vagina in his diaper. “Fuck it.” He said. He removed the cap and tossed it,
careful not to hit the shit cloud, throwing things at it seemed to really piss
it off. He took another long swallow, which bubbled in the bottle’s neck
several times. As he drank, he raised his middle finger from the neck of the
bottle in a New York salute to his shit cloud.

Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand Nolte stared down
at the carpet for several seconds, as though someone had discarded the answer
to something important on the floor and he had stumbled across it, but had yet
to decide if it was important enough to pick up.

Sometimes, profound insights would reveal themselves to him
in moments such as these. The answers to the universe could be found in these
moments. Though they were fleeting, unspeakable and vanished with the moment,
they remained on the tip of his mute tongue for few seconds and that felt good.
To hold the answer to everything, even though you couldn’t understand it, or
describe it, felt good. Several hard, semi-drunk blinks later and whatever
revelation Nolte had thought he had found, was once again a mystery lost to the
ages.