Freezer Burn (4 page)

The mosquitoes had enjoyed quite a feast. Bill’s lips were swollen and his face wasn’t feeling all that good either. It seemed as if his skin was a sack of light bulbs someone had stepped on. Bill lay there and felt the steamy heat and brought a weak hand up and slapped the mosquitoes away. They gathered back, like beggars looking for money.

Bill ran a hand over his face, was amazed to feel what the mosquitoes had done. His skin felt like some kind of craft project that involved glue, stones, dried peas, and seashells. He wobbled to his feet, walked around, found a dead calf lying in the middle of the saw grass. The little dude was covered in mud, mosquitoes, worms, ants, and flies. Bill wondered about the worms and ants. How the hell did they get on these islands? Were they like him? Fuck-ups who had ended up here with no place to go and nothing to eat but a stupid calf that had crawled through a fence after greener grass, wandered off into the swamp and died.

Now that he thought about it, he decided he wasn’t like the ants or worms at all. He was more like the calf. He had struck out for greener pastures and ended up
with a faceful of bug needles and an intense dose of the raw ass. And the water hadn’t done his shoes any favors either. He reached down, got hold of one of the soles, discovered it was coming loose. His feet felt awful in his shoes. Squishy, lumpy, and damned uncomfortable.

Bill studied the calf, and for a moment envied the insects. Even that rotting meat looked good. He felt weak and hungry and just plain mad. He didn’t have so much as a stick of gum to chew. He found himself watering up thinking of those cans of beets back at the house.

Shit, it wasn’t supposed to come out this way. His mother had been right. He was stupid. She said that’s why she was giving everything she owned to the cat livers, because a liver might be fixed, and he surely couldn’t.

Bill let out his breath and felt sorry for himself. He’d had a batch of money in his hands and he lost it in the car. The firecrackers too. He had panicked. He hadn’t even thought to grab the money on the way out of the car. The heist was at the bottom of the swamp somewhere. Monopoly money for some gator.

The mosquitoes were so fierce Bill found himself forced off the island and into the swamp water. It was deep on the other side, but he decided to go that way for no other reason than he didn’t want to go backwards.

The deputy had most likely called reinforcements by now, or perhaps he was still wandering madly about in the bottoms, waving his shotgun and firing his pistols, frightening the wildlife and calling everything he saw a cocksucker.

Bill waded and tried to figure his odds. He decided they might not be too bad. Maybe someone across the
way had seen the car, but that didn’t mean they had recognized him. Even if they found Fat Boy’s body, which they would, and found Chaplin at the bottom of the swamp with a Roman candle in his head, it didn’t mean he was implicated. If he could get out of the swamp and make it back to his place, perhaps he could lay low and the whole thing would slide by. There might be suspicions, but that wasn’t the same as facts. Maybe if he used his head he could get to the car Fat Boy had planted. But no, that wouldn’t be smart. That belonged to Fat Boy, and he wanted to stay away from anything like that. He tried to remember if there was anything of his in Fat Boy’s hidden car, but he couldn’t think of a thing except a Baby Ruth wrapper, and he didn’t know if that would hold fingerprints or not. Maybe if they were smeared with chocolate. But no, he remembered now that he had thrown the wrapper out the window. He felt good about that. Maybe things were coming out better than he had expected.

’Course, he figured he’d have to do something with Mama, in case the cops came by to search. They might get a lead or something, and if they didn’t find anything there to make them suspicious, he’d be all right. But a rotting old woman in the bedroom in black plastic bags would be a sure tip-off. He had to find a way to get rid of her. Feed her to some dogs or something. There had to be a way.

Then again, what if he had been somehow identified and the cops had already searched, found Mama and her aroma? They could be lying in wait for him.

Bill went on like that for a time, his mind wandering aimlessly from one thought to another and not clinging to any one of them in a serious fashion.

He ducked under the water and came up with a handful of mud and rubbed it on his face and the back of his neck to keep back the mosquitoes. It worked pretty well. The cloud of mosquitoes diminished, if failed to vanish.

Bill swam to a clutch of logs in the middle of the swamp and clung there. The logs were rotting and they had drifted down into this slow part of the water and were dammed up there, as if resting. In their midst, Bill could see a floating Clorox bottle with a line on it. Someone’s homemade trot line most likely. He got hold of it and pulled on it to see if there might be a fish, but there wasn’t even a hook. Whatever might have been hooked had long broken loose. He let the Clorox bottle go. Free of the log jam it floated out into the middle of the water and collected green moss.

After about fifteen minutes of rest, hanging on the logs, being of service to hungry mosquitoes who had discovered an unprotected spot on the crown of his head, Bill struck out again.

He made another spit of dirt, crossed it, waded, swam, and did this routine until it was high noon and he was so hungry he thought if he could bend over far enough he’d gnaw his balls off.

Finally the swamp thinned, broke, and there was a barbed wire fence and a mushy stretch of pasture. Possibly the calf’s home before it wandered off in search of its fortune.

Bill started across the pasture, stepped in cow shit, saw some cows, and by late midday came to the end of the pasture and another barbed wire fence. He crossed the fence and kept walking. The ground had become more solid. He was finally getting away from the swamp
and bottom land. The mosquitoes were less thick and less insistent. He was weak and hungry and hot and his head hurt all over from the mosquito bites. He felt as if he had been beat in the face with a rake.

Eventually he came to a thin line of trees and a creek. The water was fairly clear. He got down by the side of the creek and cupped his hands and pulled water out and drank it. His tongue was swollen and hot and the water felt and tasted pretty good, but there was a coppery aftertaste.

Perhaps he had swallowed some of the swamp water and it had made him sick, or maybe he had been sleeping with his mouth open and a batch of mosquitoes had enjoyed a tongue sandwich, and all this had thrown off his taste buds.

It didn’t matter. He was still thirsty, so he dipped his hand and drank more, but this time he realized the taste in his mouth was from the water.

He looked up the creek, saw there was a film in the water and the film was dark, the color of cough syrup. Bill went down the creek and around the bend and jumped back. There in the water, the top of his head blown off, his ankle stretched out and wrapped in some vines, was the deputy.

Bill squatted down and looked at him. The deputy’s jaw was gone and so was the top of his head. Bill could see that somehow the deputy had tripped and the sawed-off shotgun had gone off and caught the deputy under the chin and stopped him from cussing, walking, or anything else.

At first Bill was elated, then he realized that with the deputy missing a manhunt would go out for certain. Probably there was one already with the cops combing
the area for the firecracker stand robbers, and when they found this deputy, boy were they going to be mad.

’Course, that still didn’t mean they knew he was involved. If he was careful, he might go undetected.

Bill crawled up to the other side of the creek and peeked through the thin line of trees there, saw something that surprised him.

PART TWO

Frost

There was a huge pasture and the grass was cut way short and summer-burned to the color of a saltine cracker, and Bill knew if he stepped on it the grass would crackle like corn flakes. Parked on the pasture were a number of caravan-style trucks and silver trailers with brightly painted sides hooked up to semi-cabs, and there was an old station wagon and a motor home.

The trailers had pictures of weird people, wild animals, and snakes painted on them, and blazed across one in red paint was ODDITIES OF THE WORLD.

There was one shiny silver trailer off to the right, away from the others, as if placed there on special assignment. Painted on its side in black and blue was a stocky, bearded wild man encased in a block of ice. The man was blue-skinned with black hair and the ice block was a lighter blue. Above this were the words ICE MAN written out as if in icicles.

There were a handful of people moving amongst the trailers and trucks, and even from a distance Bill could tell they were not normal folk. One was a tall lean pinheaded man in overalls and another was a woman with
a beard and a green dress with some kind of dark pattern on it.

There were a number of others that Bill could not see well, and could only think of as being in various states of ugly. One actually ran on all fours, and had a spine bent like a horseshoe. A midget in a porkpie hat stood next to the bearded lady, as if ready to crawl under her dress and hide.

Bill settled down in the creek bed and looked at the dead deputy and wondered what he should do. He was surprised at how tired he was. The creek bed was cool and there was an indentation in it and the dirt was soft and damp, and without really realizing it, Bill made himself comfortable, and soon was asleep.

When Bill awoke he was famished and thirsty and none of it had been a dream. It was growing late and the sunlight had lessened, though it would be light until nine o’clock or so. Bill wondered what time it was. He went over to the deputy and checked to see if the deputy had a watch. He did.

Bill picked up the deputy’s arm and pulled it out of the water and looked at the watch on the corpse’s wrist. The watch was obviously waterproof. The second hand ticked away, and the time read seven forty-six.

Well I’ll be screwed and tattooed, thought Bill, I’ve slept for hours.

Bill dropped the deputy’s wrist, waded upstream away from the flow of blood from the deputy’s head—which had stopped, but the idea of it still bothered him—and dipped his hand in the water and scooped out a drink. The water felt good and tasted sweet at first, but soon it made his stomach hurt.

He decided he had to find food, no matter what. It was just the sort of thing that would make him fuck up, being this hungry. He had to have something to eat, even if he had to show himself to a bunch of freaks.

Bill came out of the creek and climbed over the bank and walked toward the caravan. There weren’t as many freaks as before, but he could see the guy who ran on all fours, and two that he had not seen earlier. They both appeared to have heads about the size and shape, if not the color, of jack-o’-lanterns. They were tossing a Frisbee back and forth, and the dog-man was running between them, leaping up, trying to grab the thing in his mouth. The meat heads laughed and the dog-man made a crude noise and kept at it.

Bill staggered in their direction. It was slightly warmer away from the riverbank, and Bill could see the late evening sun hanging low in the sky like a cracked fertile egg, leaking gold and yellow and blood-red chicken all over the horizon, seeping through the trees.

Scissortails darted across the sky in search of bugs, and Bill could hear cars out on the highway beyond, buzzing happily along with no concerns for lost heist money, wet Roman candles, dead deputies, or melting mothers in black plastic bags.

As Bill neared the trailers the meat heads ceased their game, paused to look at him. The dog-man didn’t seem to notice, and when one of the freaks lowered the Frisbee to his side, the dog-man snatched it from his hand with his mouth, ran in a circle and leaped and came down and saw Bill walking toward him. The Frisbee dropped from the dog-man’s mouth and he pushed his head in Bill’s direction, as if trying to recognize someone familiar. Bill got the impression the man might even
be sniffing the air, but he was too far away to be certain.

As he grew nearer, the dog-man began to hop up and down like a mechanical pup, then bounded away in the direction of one of the trailers.

Bill didn’t realize it right off, but as he neared the freaks, he discovered he had both of his hands extended, palm up, beggar position. He was so hungry and so tired, so in need of anything and everything, he couldn’t help himself. He fell down twice, and pretty soon the freaks with the big heads had him under each arm and were half carrying, half dragging him toward the trailers.

Perhaps, he thought, I am an alien abductee, and a moment from now they’ll have me on a cold table with salad tongs spreading my butt cheeks and a cold wet alien finger up my ass. You hear about alien abductions, the asshole is always a prime target. And they liked to jack people off for sperm. He thought he could handle that part better than the finger up the ass. It might even be kind of restful.