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  “Why, what a wonderful surprise!” the woman behind the desk exclaimed. “City fellas! We get ’em passin’ through fairly reg’lar. Let me guess…” She brought a finger to her chin. “New York City!”

  “Good guess, ma’am,” Augie addressed her, a little glumly. “We just drove down, figured we’d stay a week or so. It’s a…beautiful town you’ve got here.”

  The woman howled laughter. “No need ta be polite, son. Our town’s a redneck shit-pit’n you know it. Bet’cha someone tolt ya ’bout Krazy Sallee’s, huh?”

  Augie had to grin. “Oh, no, ma’am, we heard there was a fabulous library here— oh, oh!—and the fine arts museum!”

  The lady howled more laughter, slapping the counter. The outburst went on long enough for the situation to become uncomfortable. For fuck’s sake, Brice thought. The lady sounds like a hyena.

  “Son,” she said as Augie signed them all in, “you got yerself enough shit ta fill a horse trough, and I like that! Cain’t fool me—you boys come here ta git’cher willies waxed Southern style. So’s just you all have a dandy time! And ta show ya how much we appreciate ya staying with us, I’ll give ya our presidential suite at no extra charge!”

  After mounting two flights of stairs, Brice, Augie, and Clark soon found themselves standing in the open doorway of their accommodations. Augie grinned in an almost childlike thrill, while Brice and Clark simply stood slack-jawed.

  “Presidential suite?” Brice questioned.

  “Yeah, if you’re the president of fucking Chad,” Clark replied.

  “Don’t be fussbudgets!” Augie criticized. “This is the change from the city we needed. Slice of life, boys! A dump like this? It’s refreshing.”

  Brice’s face lengthened from his frown. “Refreshing? The room smells like piss, Augie.”

  “Quit bitching. This’ll be a blast!”

  Brice’s eyes took in the “suite.” Handprints smudged the peeling wallpaper, suspicious stains blotched a carpet that looked half a century old. Two smaller rooms branched off from the main, both cramped, dirty bedrooms with sagging beds. Duct tape covered several cracks in the windows, and, of all things, one of the few uncracked panes was smudged by lips prints that Brice hoped were from lipstick and not blood. Clark looked appalled into a waste can full of Ice House beer bottles, fast food bags, empty Skoal tins, and multitudinous empty condom packets.

  In the left bedroom, Augie grinned out the window, then laid down on the bed with his fingers laced behind his head, testing the squeaky springs. “I’m laying claim to this room, guys.”

  But Brice and Clark barely heard him in their stupefaction. They were eyeing (with some trepidation) the atrocious pull-out couch in the main room. The crackly upholstery appeared to be knife-slashed.

  “Let’s give the maids a little credit,” Brice said. “At least they managed to pull up all the crime scene tape.”

  Clark proposed, “Let’s flip. Loser gets this-this-this…thing that might’ve been a couch back when Eisenhower was in office.”

  Brice pulled out a quarter. “Sounds fair enough,” and he flipped the coin. “Call it, doctor.”

  “Heads.”

  Brice caught the coin, then slowly opened his palm. Please, please, please, he begged the fates. But the flip came up heads. “Lucky me,” he muttered.

  As Clark meandered into the second bedroom (if one could actually call it a bedroom), Brice grimaced as he pulled open the sleeper couch. He thought of all the urban legends where dead bodies were stashed under beds or inside the mattresses of hotel beds, and wouldn’t have been surprised if all those stories got started here at the “Due Drop In.” He caught a minor break when he didn’t find a dismembered body, but he immediately lurched back anyway, first from the foul trashy odor that wafted up—a dirty-laundry smell blended with a tinge like garbage in the sun—and second from the detailed vision his eyes now beheld of several used prophylactics. “Oh, for shit’s sake!” he yelled.

  Augie strolled back into the room. “What’s wrong, Brice?”

  “What’s wrong? Oh, nothing much—just a bunch of used rubbers in my bed!”

  “Aw, forget it,” Augie dismissed. “Like Uncle Stewie used to tell us when we were kids, a little nut never hurt anyone.”

  The words locked Brice in place; his mouth dropped open. “Uncle Stewie said that?”

  Augie smirked and rolled his eyes. “It’s a joke, Brice. Jeez.”

  Brice was close to the limitations of his tolerance. Perhaps it was some unconscious, self-depreciating impulse that triggered his next move, as he bent down, grimacing, and pulled up the flimsy mattress’s corner. “Oh-oh my—What is…” and a moment later, betwixt the tip of his thumb and the tip of his index finger, he raised an age-yellowed rubber glove with one brown finger. He gave Augie a mute look of horror.

  “Would you relax? It’s probably just the maid’s.”

  “Oh, right, and I guess it was the maid who just decided to finger her asshole in our ‘presidential suite?”

  “Try it on. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

  Brice shuddered. “No way, Augie! This is beyond the pale.”

  “Yeah,” Clark agreed, coming back into the room with a very queasy look. “The dead roaches on my floor sound like potato chips when you walk on ’em, and my bed’s making scratching noises—”

  “Cool! So is mine!” Augie exclaimed.

  “They’re probably bed bugs or some other nocturnal parasite. We could get Chagas disease, man, or trypanosome disorder.”

  “If we’re lucky,” Brice muttered.

  Augie frowned the comment away. “Good. Then our stuck-up Manhattan blood’ll kill the little fuckers. We’ll be doing the joint a favor.”

  “You’re not hearing us,” Brice raised his voice. “This motel is unacceptable. The place would send a hazmat team heading for the hills. It’s filthy, it stinks. There are so many handprints on the walls you’d think this was the fuckin’ Blair Witch Project. Shit, I’ll bet people have died on that couch. Forget it. We’ll have to find another motel.”

  Augie’s shoulders slumped. “There aren’t any other motels; that’s what Gurgler told me. This is the only game in town.”

  “Dick Gurgler. Great. I guess he’s our travel agent now.”

  “Listen, fellas,” Augie said. “So what if the place is a shit-hole? Think of it as an adventure! I want something different on this trip!”

  “Well, this is certainly different,” Clark pointed out. “I’ll bet we all get staph infections.”

  Again, Brice muttered, “If we’re lucky.”

  “How about this? I’ll slip a hundred bucks to Aunt Bee downstairs and tell her to get the place cleaned up. We’re here to party. We’re here to be out of New York. Now, let’s split, grab a bite, and then get ready to pound some white trash pussy!”

  “Aw, fuck,” Clark sputtered. “What the hell.”

  Brice sighed in resignation. “All right. Shit, I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this. Let me get my mace.”

  “What do you need that for?” Augie asked, as if the notion were absurd.

  “In case someone tries to mug us, genius.”

  Augie laughed. “Don’t be a wussy. This is Petticoat Junction, man, not the fuckin’ Bronx. There’s no crime here…”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The grave took awhile to dig, even for two big strong young men like Horace and Guts. (Digging graves is a lot harder than one would think, nothing like in the movies!) It was an appropriate time and place for such a thing, however—a wonderful, atmosphere drenched cliché: deep in the midst of the woods, crickets chirping and birds cawing. There was an occasional hoot of a distant owl, and the branches of gnarled, primeval trees gave the impression of skeletal arms reaching out. So dense were these woods that even at five in the afternoon, it could have passed for evening. When Gut and Horace finished digging, they stood leaning on their shovels, huffing and wiping sweat off their brows with brawny fat forearms.

&nbs
p; “Ready, Horace?” Gut inquired.

  “Dang straight, brother,” Horace assented.

  The hole was about two and a half feet deep (not the mythical six-feet so common in lore). It was hardly necessary to dig much past two and a half—in these dense woods? But the grave took twice as long to excavate than usual for this time they were digging for two.

  The hole looked like a black sump in the soft forest ground; imaginative persons might envision a hellish abyss or some cryptic lair for a nameless monstrosity. The first body was that of the hapless drug dealer known as Triple M, minus nearly the entirety of his epidermis of course, which made for macabre vision in the shunted light.

  FWAP! went the body when the pair of brothers tossed it into the grave. “So much for that fella,” Horace said.

  “Yeah. Beddie-bye time.”

  Gut hauled the grave’s next tenant closer to the hole: the just-as-hapless young blond woman. By now the corpse had been deprived of all of its apparel, and one with perhaps a deviant bent might try to envision what had been done to that pale but still-rather-attractive physique in the preceding hours. It hardly mattered in the long run but…it was merely an interesting conjecture. The most attention, however, had been paid to the three-inch-wide hole in the woman’s skull, an evil aperture in which pink-white brains could still be glimpsed.

  Gut chuckled. “Yeah, we shore filled this ’un’s head up with nut.”

  “We shore did, Gut! We shore did! Like the ole saying goes, who needs poon when ya can hump a head?”

  FWAP! went the body when it was tossed beside the skinned drug dealer.

  Again, the absolutely macabre vision presented itself: that of the woman’s pallid face, oddly lucent, uniquely agape in the suffix of this most unconscionable death.

  Horace lifted a shovel-full of earth but just as he would empty it, Gut said, “Hold up there, bro,” and he stood at the side of the grave. The sound of a zipper going down could be heard, then, “Ahhhhhh…”

  “What’cha doin’?” Horace asked the rather needless question.

  “Takin’ a pee, what’s it look like?” The glittery stream of Gut’s urine cascaded onto the blond woman’s face, making her appalled expression appear almost reactive and understandably more appalled. Gut chuckled, “Got to have out with the old beer ta make room fer the new!” The stream was manipulated down the woman’s face, then down her breasts (one deflated, one still standing out grandly), then the pubis. In a few moment’s time the aghast corpse shined like oil. Eventually, Gut directed his seemingly endless urinary flow back to the woman’s face, filling her mouth. “And I shore’s shit cain’t think of better place fer me to pee than right smack-dab in this here drug-whore’s pie hole, huh?”

  Horace watched in a sort of forlorn fascination. “Looks kind’a, well, kind’a fun.”

  Gut glanced over. “You mean ta tell me you ain’t never peed on a dead gal before? Dang, brother, you need ta get out more. Step right up!”

  Horace paused, shrugged, then deposed himself to follow his brother’s example. There was really no reason to decline the invitation. It made for a curious sight: the agape mouth of a nude, one-breasted dead woman being urinated into in the middle of the woods by two huge men who looked exactly alike.

  Soon they both zipped up, filled the grave back up with earth, and high-fived. “All in a night’s work!” Horace remarked.

  “Dang straight, brother,” Gut replied. “I kinda wish we’d thought ta try ta fill up that skag’s titty, though, back’t the way it was.”

  “Hell, you shoulda said somethin’ ‘fore now, Gut. I bet we coulda blowed that thing up big as a watermelon! It woulda sloshed around like a water balloon.”

  “Yeah, but we got a more important sloshed to worry about now—it’s Miller Time!”

  Both mammoth men lumbered away, whooping, but as they did so, and quite unbeknownst to them, a figure emerged from the brush some minutes later; the figure of a man, a short spindly man with longish unkempt hair, five-o’clock shadow, with his left earlobe missing.

  He froze in place just at the foot of the grave, listening.

  Eventually the receding footfalls of the brothers abated, then a pair of car doors were heard thunking closed off in the distance. An engine started and then the sound trailed off as it drove away.

  Safe now, thought the spindly figure.

  He lowered to his knees and immediately began to dig out earth with his bare hands. The process wasn’t a difficult one, for the two brothers hadn’t even tamped the earth back down once the grave had been refilled. It didn’t take long before…

  “Damn,” the man muttered. “I knew it…”

  The grave wasn’t at all deep. He’d uncovered the corpse of the blond woman to the waist, and then canted her body upward as if to deliberately inspect her head.

  Dirty hands brushed away more dirt and urine-generated mud, until the figure could make out details of the 3-inch hole in the skull.

  “I knew it,” he repeated under his breath. “Another header,” and with that acknowledgment, he unbuckled his pants, and…

  Well, what he did after that needn’t be described.

  ««—»»

  The diner defined the colloquialism “Greasy Spoon”: ‘50s-style tables (probably not intended as a throwback, so much as that was just what they had), a raised counter, the sounds of cooks arguing in the back. Portly waitresses cruised back and forth between tables, their hair in buns and their faces over-make-upped. Augie and Clark both sat content in one of the window booths whose upholstery was a tacky bright red. Brice was absent for the moment, in the men’s room.

  “So what’s with your brother?” Clark asked. “He seems to be all tensed up. He’s not still busted up over Marcie, is he? That was a while ago.”

  Augie was inspecting the fake mosaic pattern of the table top. “It’s not just Marcie dumping him, it’s the screw-job move the bitch pulled after that. Hard stuff.”

  “What do you mean? What screw-job?”

  Augie nodded. “Marcie left him right after he lost the Bryson account. That was a half-mil-per-year retainer. I always told him she was a gold-digger. Now he’s learned the hard way.”

  “Brice is a sharp lawyer, too sharp to fall apart because of one account. Shit happens.”

  “Yeah, but the kick in the ass was who Marcie left him for. Derrick Hathoway—”

  Clark acted shocked. “What! I thought they were both—”

  “Yep,” Augie finished for him. “They were best friends since Harvard. And wouldn’t you know it? Hathoway’s the guy who landed the Bryson account. The minute that bitch found out Hathoway got the gig, Brice was history.”

  “Wow, that is hard. Not one but two knives in the back.”

  “Yeah, but he’s gotta wake up and smell the coffee. I mean, look at you and me; we both got the shaft from gold-digging bitches but we’re not boo-hooing about it. There’s treachery in all our professions. I’ve been back-stabbed by other brokers, and I’m sure you’ve lost patients to other doctors. We can’t just fold over every hard knock. Brice needs to snap out of it.”

  Suddenly Clark took an impatient glance over his shoulder. “Speaking of Brice, where the hell is he?”

  Augie chuckled. “Yeah, he seems to be taking an awful long time to piss. Hope he’s not back there sobbing.”

  ««—»»

  Brice felt weighed down by some unplaceable lethargy; he was absolutely dejected in the cramped and none-too-fragrant diner men’s room. After washing his hands he took out his iPhone, without even being consciously aware, and found himself thumbing through the snapshots of his photo gallery. The first photo showed Brice smiling alongside his friend Derrick Hathoway, both in their graduation caps at Harvard. Looking at that photo now made him feel a hundred miles away, with a sinking feeling in his stomach. The next photo, however, was worse: Brice next to a stunning, busty blonde whose facial beauty beamed like a beacon of light. They were arm in arm, both emblazoned in an aura of
love.

  This, of course, was Marcie.

  The thought croaked in his head like a voice anyone’s but his own: I need to delete that picture…just like she deleted me…

  Just before a tear would come to his eye, he gulped, gritted his teeth, and shoved the iPhone back into his pocket. He deleted nothing.

  Brice wended his way through the diner, which was full of noisy chatter and amicable hayseeds. Several times he nearly bumped into other patrons, until he caught himself and focused. His ruminations about Marcie, Derrick Hathoway, etc., weren’t letting go of him. Get your shit together, he demanded of himself. Don’t ruin everyone else’s time just because you can’t get over a shitty relationship. Eventually he made it back to the booth and sat down. “Why do I have this feeling you guys were talking about me?”

  Augie waved dismissively. “Don’t be so self-absorbed, bro. You’re not that important; it’s not all about you. You act like you think you’re the center of the universe. Well guess what? You’re not.” Then he paused, blurted a laugh, and slapped Brice on the shoulder. “Just kidding, buddy. And if you wanna know the truth, we were talking about you.”

  “Just try to tune him out, Brice,” Clark said. “It works for me.”

  “Clark wishes he could be as cool and witty as me.” Augie looked back at his menu. “So what are we having, guys?”

  “The funnel cakes sound good,” Clark said. “And, wow, muskrat casserole! That might be interesting.

  “Might be, might not be.” Brice winced at the menu. “Cattail waffles, chicken livers, chitterlings? No way. Oh, and look how they spelled early bird: b-u-r-d. Can you believe that?”

  “What a tube steak,” Augie said.

  “I believe the word is pedant,” Clark appended. “One who points out the errors of others to aggrandize himself and belittle others.”

  “Aggrandize this,” Brice replied, pointing to his crotch.

  Augie bulled in, “Come on, kids. Enough grab ass. Let’s order… Oh, cool! Barbecued deer ribs!”