MalContents (3 page)

“Come on in, Sheriff Dan!” he shouted. “Your whore’s dead on the floor.”

Jesse and Queenie were still somewhere behind him but Melvin was no longer concerned with them. He had an ice pick in his spine, and he might have to crawl on his elbows out of the whorehouse to the car, but he was not going to be shot down by a whore-fucking lawman. If he was destined to die tonight—and the old fortuneteller’s prediction that he would die in a thunderstorm did not now seem at all farfetched—it would not be by the hand of some backwoods sheriff.

But so far, Sheriff Dan wasn’t taking the bait. Melvin had hoped the man’s anger would bring him on in for the lead-slinging hooraw, but the sheriff, to his credit, wasn’t that dumb.

“Go see what he’s doing,” Melvin said over his shoulder.

“He’s probably gone out to his car to radio for deputies,” Queenie said.

“Hell, we better go get him,” said Jesse with irritated resignation.

“And then drag his ass in here so I can put one in him too,” Melvin said. It was a foolish thing to say, and it drove home the fact that he might be crippled for the rest of his life—if he managed to outlive the prophesied storm, that was.

Brandishing their pistols, Jesse and Queenie went side-by-side through the archway and into the foyer.

Melvin twisted at the waist and looked over his shoulder to get a fix on Wolf Girl. She was on her hands and knees, a trickle of blood on her forehead, and she was licking the dead madam’s face. He wanted very badly to shoot her but he would have to do a lot of elbow-crawling to reposition himself for a clean shot, and that would leave his back to the archway the sheriff would be coming through if he got past Jesse and Queenie, so Melvin held his position to see how things were going to shake out. He would shoot the wooly little bitch later. When he looked back around, his two companions were out of sight.

At the tail-end of a long rumble of thunder, two booming shotgun blasts filled the foyer, and Jesse flew backward across the tall archway that framed Melvin’s view from the floor.

He heard Queenie say in a queer voice: “Jesse? I can’t see. Jess . . .?”

After two pops of a pistol, Queenie said no more.

Melvin heard the sheriff and Zelda whisper back and forth, and then shotgun-wielding Sheriff Dan strolled right into Melvin’s gun-sights and fired a blast at the room. Melvin shot him twice in the chest and once in belly, and the big man keeled over dead. Zelda started shrieking from the staircase.

“Zelda baby, shut up and come in here,” Melvin said. “I’ll give you a thousand dollars to drive me out of here.” He didn’t have that kind of money but she didn’t know it. She was his ticket out of this whorehouse hellhole.

He crawled toward the foyer so Zelda would see the sorry state he was in and take pity on him.

But Wolf Girl wasn’t done with him.

She pounced on his hips, pulled the ice pick out of his back and commenced to stabbing him repeatedly, working that sharp steel up and down his backbone until his spine went as cold as a block of ice.

The more holes she punched in him, the harder Melvin howled.

Zelda and the rest of the whores watched impassively from the archway as the tireless girl stabbed the life out of him. Then she stopped stabbing and bent down to sink her teeth into the soft flesh of his neck, gnawing and grinding and then ripping off a chunk of dripping flesh. She spat it out and dived down for more.

But Melvin Locust was already elsewhere. He was rumbling down a dark road in a spanking new blue Studebaker with white leather seats and white sidewalls. A pack of howling she-wolves chased him, but he knew they could never catch him now.

He honked his horn, laughed, and howled back at them.

He didn’t know where this muddy road went, but he reckoned it couldn’t be any worse than the hell house he’d just left.

All he had to do was outrun this howling storm.

Part Two

Call me Wolf Girl. When you want something wild. Me, I would never call somebody like me. No matter how hot to trot I got. Because I know how I am. Because I know you might end up dead. Maybe I should wear a Don’t Feed The Animal sign around my hairy neck. If I like you I’ll let you live. If your luck’s running right. But if you’re an evil son of a bitch, you’re as good as dead. And I’m not easy to fool—I know most men are evil. About most women, let’s say the jury’s still out.

Men liked me because I was just a kid. And hairy like a cute cuddly bunny or sweet little dog you love to pet. Men liked to fuck me. I was little and tight and they were sick fucks so they liked me.

And I never talked. That’s why the dog is Man’s Best Friend, you know. Because dogs don’t talk back. They just wag their cute little tails, lick their master’s balls or whatever and fetch or roll over when told to. And beg. They liked me to beg for it, to tell them how great they were. That’s what they expected out of me. That and getting their ashes hauled fast and cheap. That was me, back then. Fast and cheap. Unless I made
them
pay.

That’s why they looked so surprised when I gutted them with my knife or sliced them with my razor. Because I was so cute. Once I killed a guy with nail file. Hand to God. I did. I could write a book. How To Kill Johns Six Ways To Sunday.

Maybe this I’m writing now will be a book. Publish it in Paris. On account of it’s so evil and nasty. In Gay Paree they don’t give a shit. Anything goes there. French tickle, French kiss, French inhale, French fuck. Not that I’ve been there.

That fuck Melvin Locust was my first. He had it coming. He murdered Mama Rose. Fancied himself a big-time outlaw. The big boys don’t stick ice picks in madams just to shut em up so they can knock over the house. I worked him over with that same ice pick. Put fifty fucking holes in his backbone. At least. Nifty fifty.

Then Zelda and me hightailed it outta there in the dead outlaws’ roadster. With a dead cop in the whorehouse, we weren’t about to stay there for the party. Zelda took me under her wing. She knew I was never as wild as I’d put on. She missed Mama Rose as much as I did. We cried about her for hours. Days. I was only ever as bad as I had to be. Don’t think I was a crazed killer. I wasn’t.

We had a little money between us but not enough to last long. What’d we do? We turned tricks out of motor court rooms and made enough jack to tide us over, then we signed on the next spring with a carnival in Oklahoma City. Me as the Wolf Girl and Zelda the hootchie cootchie dancer. Where else was a hairy freak like me going to get a job? Two out-of-work whores can’t be too choosy. And I already had freak show experience. Hell, I was born to it.

Back when we first found the Tommy gun in the car I thought we should try our hand at being bank robbers but Zelda said no. Whoring was bad enough, she said. She’d already thought of joining up with a carnival and said we just had to get through winter and we’d be fine.

Meanwhile Zelda started teaching me to read and write.

Look, look, see Spot run. See Dick and Jane get some poontang.

Like that. But without the poontang.

Zelda had watched me ice pick Melvin Locust. Saw me stab him full of neat little holes and thought I needed that sin washed away. So she stole a Bible and started reading it to me every day and night. I didn’t understand much of that
thee
and
thou
stuff at first and got things confused. But after about the third week of it I began to sort of enjoy the stories. There is some wild shit in there. Nasty shit too. For a holy book, I mean. Zelda hit me hard with the Jesus stuff. She thought I needed forgiveness for my awful deed. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t want forgiveness, not from Jesus Christ Himself or anybody else either. Melvin Locust had it coming and my hand was the one God chose to do the smiting. I didn’t have the right words to tell her that then but now I do: It was divine retribution. And I was the one dishing it out, chipping away with the ice pick at the murdering son of a bitch.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord
. And mine. Yours truly, Wolf Girl.

Truth be told, it was much more than vengeance or retribution. I enjoyed killing him. I killed him over and over in my imagination. Instead of saying my prayers at bedtime, I killed Locust every night before I fell asleep. It gave me comfort. Sometimes I used the ice pick, other times I used my teeth, my hands, my feet, or anything handy. I killed him every way I could imagine. And as it turns out, I have a big imagination. Sometimes I fingered myself while I killed him and came hard as his slimy soul shot out of his bloody body. It was powerful when that happened. I never felt that way with a john. It only happened when I was killing Melvin Locust again. Sex and violent death went hand in hand down there on my hoohah. My hands were better than anything a man had. I had grown to pretty much hate pricks because of the way they hurt me. Made me bleed. Jesus had nothing on me. I could bleed with the worst of them, ripped and torn inside, crucified by cock.

You think I wasn’t going to get some sweet payback for that? Think again, chump. I knew in my gut, in my hoohah, that Melvin Locust was not my last. Put another way, there were a lot of Melvins out there—a plague of Locusts—and I was going to have my fair share.

There was no shortage of wicked sinners waiting for me. God would lead me to em and leave it to me to take care of the dirty work. Wolf Girl the Avenging Angel.

The Lord would deal with their souls. I would deal death like a card shark at the Lord’s Poker Table. Satan might sweeten the pot, bluffing or not. The Devil didn’t worry me. I was doing the Lord’s work. The Devil could kiss my hairy ass. That’s how I was back then. I’ve softened up since.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s not good, unless you like running up your own bum. I don’t. So here we go, back to when Zelda and me joined the Americana Carnival and became nomad whores on the hustle.

With my hereditary curse of profuse hair, I was a natural for the sideshow. I was, after all, a true freak of nature. Zelda had the face, the big tits and wide hips of a first-class cooch dancer. The local hymn hustlers and sky pilots might complain that the carnie strippers were corrupting the morals of the youth, but juice to the law, whether a double sawbuck or a half a yard, usually kept the heat off until it was time to break down and road up for the next two-bit town. We hit it off and fitted right in from the jump.

The Americana already had a bearded lady so I made an enemy just by getting hired on. Her name was Julia and she had a milder case of the same curse I had—the Werewolf Disease. Its medical name was a mouthful nobody ever tried to speak. Hypertrichosis. I was born with it and had thick dark hair pretty much everywhere. Julia the Bearded Lady had the full beard and patches on her forehead which she kept shaved, and patches of hair on other parts of her body. She was afraid they would give her the boot and replace her with me. I didn’t see a problem. She was the Bearded Lady, I was Wolf Girl. That should’ve been the end of it. But she wouldn’t let it go. She didn’t want any competition so she tried to kill me my first night there. She didn’t do it herself, she got a gazoonie to try to ice me. A gazoonie is carnie lingo for a roughie or roughneck, a low-paid boy who helps set up and tear down rides and game booths. I didn’t know the lingo at the time. All I knew was that the muscular guy grabbed me from behind as I was coming back from the shitter and put a blade to my throat. It was dark and I had trouble finding the trashy trailer they’d put me and Zelda in.

When you don’t talk you get pretty good at nonverbal communication. I hadn’t spoken a word since I was six. So before the gazoonie sliced open my Adam’s Apple, I reached my right hand back and grabbed his joint. I didn’t give him a chance to get scared I was going to try to rip it off. I started in rubbing it with my whorehouse wiles and he got hard right off the bat.

“You a hot little bitch, ain’t ya,” he said as he let go so I could turn around and tend to his stiff business. I unzipped him and he flopped out springy and eager. I used my mouth because biting it off was my best defense against his blade, but my whore’s intuition told me his heart wasn’t in killing me. I figured that if I did him good enough, he would want me as a regular. So I wolfed him down like a hungry little cub.

The half moon looked down on us as he stuffed his shrinking thing back in his pants. He still had the knife in his hand but I’d taken the starch out of him. “I didn’t wanna kill ya,” he confessed. “Julia, the Bearded Lady? She paid me to do it. Shee-it, a sawbuck ain’t enough for doing a cute little cocksucker like you. I’m keeping her money and telling her I’ll rat her out if she makes a stink.”

Back in the smelly trailer, I wrote it all down for Zelda. As she was deciphering my chicken-scratch, she said, “I wisht you’d try talking and save us both a lot of trouble. But I reckon you’ve forgot how by now. I’m sorry, hon.”

I wrote most of my messages on a book-size chalkboard. For longer missives I used pen and paper. This was a pen-and-paper deal. Zelda read it and said, “I’m gonna pay this bitch a visit and put the fear of the Lord in her. I don’t care if we are new. We don’t put up with this shit from nobody.”

Zelda was usually pretty easy going but when she got riled up, look out! Hell to pay. And no easy credit. The Bearded Bitch was killing a bottle of hooch when we busted in on her. A midget with king-size dong was painting her toenails with one hand and flogging his pecker with the other.