Aftertaste Page 6

  In lieu of a wine glass she uses a red Solo cup—which is fine, they hold more anyhow.

  Cup number one brings about some ideas about what her future might be like. Halfway through cup two, she’s thinking that things might one be better day if she actually gets up off her ass and makes some changes. On the final sip of the second cup she is okay with how things are, but she still has some minor complaints.

  Stepping back out onto the patio, taking the slurp off the top of the filled cup number three before it spills, she almost misses the seat of the lawn chair and her mind clicks onto the fella she hit with her car this morning. And some tiny part inside her—the one that used to believe lightning bugs were pixies and a big strong man who lived on a mountain threw the Fourth of July fireworks by hand—wants to believe his story, too. She wants to think that life outside of work, grocery shopping, and living in a falling-apart trailer being unhappy all the time might not always be just a fantasy.

  Her cup is empty again already. Galavance doesn’t remember getting up or going down the patio steps but she’s standing in front of her car feeling the crinkled sheet metal and the button still pressed in hard and permanent there. She wants to think there is something to Zilch’s story. A part of her wishes she hadn’t driven off when he got out of the car. It suddenly feels like she might have left the change she’d been thinking about making standing on the side of the fucking road in the middle of the sticks.

  “Good going, idiot,” Galavance says to herself, and sits on the patio again, waiting for the other idiot to get home.

  Zilch, from the front porch of 1330 Whispering Pines Lane, watches the last of the workers leave for the day. Tools locked up, equipment stowed, they pile into pickup trucks and rusty beaters and cloud the unfinished road with brown dust, leaving in a swarm of country music and untuned engines.

  He’s completely alone in the neighborhood now, and Zilch sits and lets his head ache—a dull throb telling him the thing he’s after is around here, somewhere. He waits, wishing for God to either give him a little more push in the right direction or throw a pack of Marlboros down into his lap. And a lighter, if He isn’t too busy.

  Zilch looks over his shoulder at the front of the house. He’d let himself in a couple hours ago—is it considered a B & E if there’s no front door?—and searched the building, finding only an old cooler with melted ice, a TV, some kind of video game thing, and some folding lawn chairs. The hood of the car in the garage was cold to the touch and there was no sign of anyone—upstairs or down—to whom it might belong. The pain continued though, and unwilling to venture too far from it, so Zilch, without a lead to pursue, sat on the front porch, eyes closed, letting the ache churn in his mind. He kept trying to picture Susanne, trying to make new memories out of the old, see her face, see her smile, hear her laugh.

  “I’m sorry,” he tells her, in his mind, once he sees every freckle of his imaginary version of her has been dotted on, perfectly, as they had been all those years before. “I’m really sorry, babe.”

  And just like then, she doesn’t forgive him. She turns away, and leaves, their apartment door slamming shut behind her hard enough to make a framed picture—of them—jump off its nail.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The image echoes painfully in his head. She turns away, and leaves. The door slams, the picture hits the floor.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She leaves. Slam. Picture hits the floor, smash.

  A nearby rustling draws Zilch’s focus back to the present. He shoots to his feet, wiping at the corner of his eye where a tear had been welling up.

  The streetlights are sporadic, only six lining the unpaved road and at odd intervals, but one throws blazing orange light onto the neighboring house, which is almost completed. It’s there, out front, that a figure rises out of the shadows. It looks like it’s made from the same rolled-out grass it was hiding among, carpeted in bushy greenery. It faces Zilch, but seems unsure if it has been spotted and takes one step backward, bent at the waist, then another, trying to retreat further into the darkness, sneaky but failing. The thing has a bolt-action rifle in its hands.

  “I can see you, you know,” Zilch calls, hands cupped around his mouth. “Why don’t you come over here? We’ll talk.” Lizard Man is packing heat? Not good.

  The figure shifts its hands on the gun, gripping tighter. It doesn’t raise and take aim but it does shake its shrub-like head. Zilch notices as it steps through a sliver of moonlight cutting through the trees that the creature’s hands aren’t covered in green tendrils but are instead flesh tone, its fingers small fat digits.

  It takes another slow step back, hesitates, then turns and bolts. Zilch stumbles a few steps forward to give chase but the thing dodges into a small grove of trees operating as a property line between two of the unoccupied residences, and blends in so easily it’s like goddamn magic trick. One moment it’s there, then it’s not.

  “Shit,” Zilch says, peering into the dark. His heart pounds. He does not want to get shot—duh—but he also wants to make the pain in his head go away.

  A half-beat later, he hears an engine up the street turn over and a set of headlights spark to life. Zilch watches helplessly as the thing—and now that it’s in better light it’s obvious that it’s just a guy in a homemade ghillie suit—drives off in a black sedan. He stares after it, noticing the car’s license plate has been obscured with strips of duct tape.

  The car speeds away. Probably just some guy stealing boxes of nails and whatever else he could find lying around in the construction sites. The rifle and bush costume are a bit excessive, though.

  Zilch stands in the road, coming to terms with his disappointment and frustration.

  Then, a disquieting yowl; wet, gurgling, and prolonged. The sound sharpens up into a shriek, crescendos at a shrill climax, and then lowers into rumbling hiss, almost like laughter, guk-guk-guk. The silence following is profound; the crickets all shut up, as well as the frogs.

  His headache ratcheting up to the point it makes his ears ring and his mouth dry out, Zilch turns and looks for the nearest thing he can halfway protect himself with. Luck would have it, there’s a shovel lying at his feet. Holding it in two hands, he faces the swamp, towards the source of the sound—his pain compass is his third eye now, dead ahead. But he can’t see anything. He hears splashing, one sloppy plash in succession after another, on fast approach. Too many hanging willows and tree trunks and cattails to make sense of anything; trying to pick anything out in this confusing mess of things, in the dark, is impossible—but the steps are getting closer, faster as they start reaching the shallows. Zilch grips the handle of the shovel, locks his loafers in the soggy rolled-out grass, and readies himself. If it’s just another ghillie man, is he prepared to whack the idiot upside the head anyways?

  But then the street lights catch its eyes, flaring two bulbous yellow eyes in the dark. The creature comes splashing up out of the bog water amongst the swamp-draining machines, moving on all fours, and there’s no mistaking it for a human. Zilch takes in long limbs, prominent upper body, round skull, and a swaying gait, a nearly comical swing of long limbs like a giraffe in flippers. It pauses, licking the air, and then sits back on its hind legs and lifts its front paws from the mud, standing. The transition from a squatting waddle-walk to a bipedal stride is herky-jerk, as if it’s fighting its instincts to make this shift.

  Maybe it had heard the car leaving and had come closer to investigate, but the thing didn’t seem have a precise lock on Zilch at the moment. He uses this to his advantage and remains stock-still, holding the shovel tight, and watches, trying to keep his breathing quiet. The creature slowly steps forward, scanning the yards of the unfinished houses cautiously. It’s not twenty yards away. Zilch can hear its slow breaths in time with its swelling bubble-like throat, laced with veins.

  The creature approaches one of the trucks with the pumping equipment in its bed. It goes right to the driver’s side door without sniffing around much,
prying its fingernails into the door frame. The old clunker opens right up, the lock popping like a firecracker. The thing shambles up inside the vehicle’s cab head-first, and from where Zilch is standing, it sounds as if it’s has found something to eat. It’s ass end is moving back and forth in the open truck door and the sound of something being shredded is audible: cracking plastic and ripping metal.

  Zilch takes a step forward. His head rings. I may not get another chance at this. He takes a step forward—snap. “Shit.”

  After glaring down at the broken twig that gave him away, he watches as the creature’s head springs up, framed in the windshield of the truck, bovine yellow eyes locking onto him. It awkwardly swivels around to stand on the edge of the door opening, keeping its unblinking gaze fastened onto Zilch, sniffing the air, arrowhead-shaped nose-slits flaring. It has wires hanging from its mouth, yellow and red. It takes only a second’s hesitation to stare at him, to size him up. Then it’s bounding—back on all fours—toward him with effortless, silent speed. It cuts across the cul-de-sac in an instant.

  Zilch readies the shovel and gives it his best grand slam swing, but the creature glides under the shovel and barrels into him, shoulder to stomach, pitching Zilch onto his back. He brings the shovel handle back down and braces it in front of his face as the monster gnashes stubby, flat teeth uncomfortably close to his face. A shove pushes the creature aside. It flips itself, inhumanely fast and flexible, to its feet, legs and arms bending backwards making rubbery sounds.

  It drops into a squat, hissing at him in the mud. Its powerful legs are long enough that its knees stand taller than its head on either side. In an oddly sporting display, the creature gives Zilch time to get up and find the shovel he dropped, wipe the mud from its handle, and get a good grip again. Patient.

  The creature’s deep-set eyes move up Zilch’s body, hesitate temporarily on his belly, and then up to his face. A damp hand rises, pointing with webbed-together index and middle fingers.

  “You’re missing a button,” it croaks.

  Zilch looks down. Sure enough. When do you suppose that—

  A plastic-wrapped load of shingles strikes him dead in the face. Zilch takes the hit as best as one man could, fumbles a few awkward lopes backwards, and regains his posture by driving the blade of the shovel into the soggy earth before he topples over. He glares at the broken pack of shingles, then at the monster, feeling the blood begin to run down his face and drip from his chin. The creature is standing again, approaching him with a typical bogeyman “I’m gonna eat you now, okay?” look in its eyes, a look Zilch is quite familiar with.

  He will not be shat out again. Zilch readies the shovel. His face hurts and he can actually hear the bugs inside him going to work to repair the damage—angry bees in a burning hive.

  “Just let me take it,” the creature says, its voice so deep and so phlegmy it’s nearly impossible to understand. Its tongue looks swollen in its mouth, flopping this way and that as it speaks. “I just want the radio.”

  “They sent me to kill you. No radio for you, fella.”

  The creature moves, finking left and right, and then springs forward with a speckled green shoulder angled towards him. Zilch is fast to move out of the way, but leaves the blade of the shovel in the creature’s path and lets its head collide with it, clonging like a bell.

  The creature isn’t remotely fazed. It grabs a handful of Zilch’s baggy dress shirt as it flies past and hoists him up off his feet—tosses him away—all in one fluid movement. Zilch spirals through the air, up over the railing of the front porch and in through the front window of the house. Without glass to break, just a sheet of translucent plastic, he slaps through with little resistance, and hits the rough plywood under-floor. Zilch slides, the chip-board biting his reaching hands as tries to brake himself, digging under his fingernails, until a high stack of sheetrock brakes him. Something in his lower back softly crunches. Through the new pain, he fumbles around, looking for the shovel, but then remembers he lost it somewhere in the airborne trip into the house. He can hear the creature now, just outside, mounting the front porch’s steps with damp slaps of webbed feet.

  Zilch looks for another weapon. He kicks and slides his feet, swiping blindly across the chipping plywood floor for anything, anything, anything.

  There is a rush of air and the creature comes soaring in through the front door and ends its colossal leap alighting mere feet from Zilch. Caught off guard by such a show of sudden velocity for a creature so big, Zilch shrieks and jumps back, and that’s when a series of tolls ring out—echoing and hollow and metallic. He’s knocked over a leaning collection of metal pipes when he backed away, one of which he quickly takes up in his hands and without hesitation, swings with all of his strength at the creature. It doesn’t weave or even duck; it takes the hit to the neck, and the next to the top of the head, and the last—a driving jab to the chest—without so much as a flinch or a big-eyed blink.

  “I just wanted the radio,” it explains and backhands Zilch, sending him stumbling back into the unfinished wall, his spine slamming up against an exposed stud. He lands funny and now his left arm is hanging at an unnatural angle, fingertips touching his elbow. Zilch’s eyes go wide—you never get used to seeing yourself pretzeled. He hears the buzzing swell under his skin, the nanobugs working overtime.

  A hot, wet hand takes him by the throat, pinning him to the studs of the wall, pink insulation ticking the back of Zilch’s neck. At this intimate proximity, the creature radiates the smell of swampy, slow decay and something akin to a drained aquarium that hadn’t been cleaned in a long time.

  It brings its face close to his. “Lick me,” it says.

  Zilch had his eyes closed, certain that this was the end. They pop open. “What? No.”

  The creature’s other hand slaps up around Zilch’s jaw, pinching his mouth open with its sticky thumb and forefinger, presenting its slime-shiny forearm to Zilch’s crushed mouth.

  “Lick me.”

  “Luk yahsulf,” Zilch manages.

  It doesn’t make another request, instead presses its flesh against Zilch’s mouth and rubs forward and back, up and down. Zilch struggles, kicks, punches, and after what feels like an unnecessarily length of time of being forced to mouth the creature’s arm like a harmonica, is shoved to the floor, discarded, like it’d been Zilch’s idea to engage in this weird activity and the creature’s sensibilities have suddenly been offended.

  Zilch, on hands and knees, arm still bent backwards but mostly operational, spits and gags. “What the hell was that about?” Spit. Hack. Spit. “You taste worse than you smell.”

  The creature stands by, seemingly waiting. Its arms hang at its sides and Zilch is about to drive a punch into its face, putting his weight behind the blow. Then the entire house moves.

  His feet go out to catch himself and his arms are spread wide, like a surfer ready for a bone-breaking wave. Zilch looks outside the window. The house is awfully close to the swamp, after all. Maybe it’s finally split from its moorings and is drifting on the water. But nothing is moving outside. Just … him.

  The creature is grinning, as much as it’s possible for it to do so.

  Pushing against the skull-cracking ache, otherworldly wind chimes sound in Zilch’s head, reminding him of that time he went to South America and his somewhat shady tour guide came back onto their river boat with something cupped in his hands. A brilliantly colored frog. They took turns giving it a lick. Ten hours later, Zilch and Susanne were still having giggle-riddled conversations with a blue-skinned, six-armed George Harrison about the benefits—both financial and moral—of selling your blood to Mogwai orphans.

  Zilch glared at the creature. “Oh, fuck. You didn’t. Tell me you’re not—”

  The bufotoxins, as they did on that vacation years ago, work fast. An electric green wave hits him and the half-finished home around Zilch twists. Rooms expand and contract and double on one another and become hallways, like something M.C. Escher would’ve d
rawn after spinning circles in the yard for an hour. A giddiness hops into Zilch, despite there being a creature in the incomplete room that could very easily kill him. He feels an incongruous chuckle climb his throat and burble out.

  “Heh … ahem. Heh. Hee-hee.” He glares at the creature, and giggles through saying: “You crafty son of a bitch. Heh. Hee-hee. You fucked me up then fucked me up, ha-ha.”

  Zilch manages to back away, still keenly aware of the danger he’s in—but he’s unable to fight the toxins and the laughs they’re chemically inspiring. The true height of the trip is still in the mail; that much is without question. Signed, sealed, and soon to be delivered.

  He stops laughing as the floor turns into a gluey wood grain paste and Zilch, even knowing that this isn’t real, feels himself sink into it. Just like in South America, this trip, too, takes a turn. His hands slap down hard to catch himself, his arm makes a grinding sound as the broken bones bang together. The floor feels like a paste he’s sinking into, waist-deep, then chest-deep. His face falls off. The wind tosses back the plastic sheet and outside the world is exploding with a billion candy-colored Chernobyl fireflies. It’s great and bad and stupid and scary, all at the same time.

  Managing to determine which way is up for a moment, Zilch sees the frog man is just a set of dark footprints on the floor. On elbows and knees (his hands and feet have departed for the time being) Zilch crawls to the doorway and watches the creature trotting back across the lawn. It stops at the pump truck at the edge of the swamp to reach inside, snatch out the stereo it’d been working on when Zilch had interrupted. Then, wires dangling, it takes a few splashing strides out into the dark water, dives, and is gone, leaving only a faint ripple as any evidence it was ever there.

  Zilch drops to his chest and forces himself onto his back. He cradles his broken arm and stares at the sheetrock ceiling, the hanging wires, and the PVC tubes. He can smell the sylvan and chemical reek of the fiberboard, the nostril-burning smell of the paint, the musty fresh cement. The sounds: the crickets are all playing full-tilt again, each in duet with a frog in one big bog song. The hallucinations keep trying to edge in, shifting these normal things to colorful, bendy alternatives. Zilch stops fighting it. He recalls, at five, eating some of the weird-tasting candy he found in his parents’ nightstand, his first unceremonious exposure to drugs. He had been left home alone that afternoon, with his eight-hit trip. What did I do then? he asks himself. Oh, right. Nothing. What can you do? Once it’s in sponged into the folds of the brain, there ain’t no scratching it back out.