More Journeys into the Strange

Contains Freaky Jules #1 and #2

]]> http://tomupton33.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/forever-freaky/feed/ 1 tomupton33 foreverfreaky-1 http://tomupton33.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/dead-skin-2/ http://tomupton33.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/dead-skin-2/#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:43:05 +0000 tomupton33 http://tomupton33.wordpress.com/?p=386 ]]>  

A tiny patch of dead skin

on the back of my hand

above fading flesh and clotting

blood turning from blue to black

Bones begin to turn to dust

Before we leave the crib

Parasites infest us

Early for the feast

From birth and first breath

The slow slide begins

Edging ever nearer

To the ultimate decline

The very earth is dying

And has been for many years

It knows no bounds of suffering

It feels no sting of tears

It slowly, slowly slips away

Bit by bit

Every day

Life is just a wishful thought

Only degrees of death

Follow us through time

To our final breath

It would have been a typical day at Adler High, except that Mary Jo Mason disappeared yesterday.

          Cops came and went all day. All the classrooms and lockers had been searched yesterday, along with every nook and cranny of the basement that was the haunt of the school’s creepy janitor. There were two squad cars parked at the front of the student parking lot at all times. It was hard to tell if they were always the same two cars. Every now and then, the school secretary came on the public address system and requested that some student or other report down at the main office.

          I didn’t have to worry about being summoned. Mary Jo wasn’t a friend of mine—not many people were. I knew who she was; I’d seen her around. She was one of the Green clique, an annoying group of tree-huggers who constantly complained about how the school, and the school district, could be more environmentally friendly. But I had as much in common with them as I had with any of the other cliques at school.  Tree-huggers, jocks, nerds, artsy-fartsy types—forget all of them; I was a clique of one, without much chance of adding on more members.

          School gossip was running thick and fast today. Somebody had sneaked into the school and kidnapped Mary Jo. Or she decided to run away and marry some old dude from Greenpeace. Or Carl Brunner, the creepy school janitor, had done something awful to her…. Gossip never ends. It’s a cozy constant that helps you get through the day in high school.

          Whether or not I wanted, I got the lowdown on Mary Jo from Melody Hansen, who was my best friend because she was my only friend. You could say she was my best friend by default. She was hopelessly shallow. She would talk, talk, talk, mostly about paltry things, and it was easy for me to tune her out. She was probably the perfect friend for me.

           Without a doubt we were the two most unpopular girls in school. I never spoke with anybody, and if anybody tried to strike up a conversation with me, I just ignored them. I didn’t want anybody to get to know me, because I was sure nobody would like me anyway. I figured it is always better to be unpopular by your own choice.

           Melody was a social outcast for an entirely different reason.    The mere fact that her mother was the assistance principal in change of discipline drove a stake through the heart of possible popularity. Without even trying, she was condemned to be as popular as me, and I was only slightly more popular than vaginal warts.

I wanted to tell this story that took place in Oland Township, Oland County, Texas, when I was a kid.

The story is about Billy Bob Dupree. Saying that he was a mean kid doesn’t seem enough; many people believed he was borderline evil. In the third grade, for instance, he shot a spitball at our teacher, Sister Margaret Olive, and hit her in the eye. He did it on purpose, too– it wasn’t even an accident. He wouldn’t apologize, either, not even after getting a good whupping by Sister Margaret and one of the other nuns. (Of course, it was already known, then, that they weren’t supposed to be whupping the students, but because it was Billy Bob, nobody really complained, not even his parents.) Anyway, what showed how mean he was wasn’t that he hit Sister Margaret in the eye; it was that afterward, she had to start wearing glasses, and Billy started calling her Sister Four-Eyes, without a pinch of guilt that he was the one responsible for it in the first place. That was how mean Billy Bob was.

Anyway, I was walking through Beauchamp Park one summer day, bored and looking for something to do, when I ran across Billy Bob. He was standing at the base of one of the old oak trees that graced the rolling green expanses of the park, and he was sneering up at the tree and apparently talking to himself.

Most kids would avoid Billy Bob at all costs, but I didn’t care much. I’d had a run-in with him last year, and survived. I hadn’t won, though; it was a short grabbling match that ended with me losing my balance and falling on my face and Billy Bob losing his balance and falling, with his considerable bulk, on my back. I had blacked out for a moment, and had– or, anyway, I think I had– what people call a near-death experience. It had been as though I was floating over the scene; I could see the two of us on the ground, and after Billy Bob struggled to his feet, he gave me a good kick in the ribs while I was unconscious.

After that, I never found Billy Bob that scary.

So I just stood there and watched as he spouted off at the tree. It was a curious sight, really; Billy Bob was a lot of things, but never talking-to-hisself crazy.

Finally my curiosity got the best of me, and I called over to him, “Hey, Billy Bob, what are you doing?”

He looked away from the tree long enough to snarl, “Mind your own business, Fireplug.”

He always called me Fireplug, and I could never figured why. I was tall and pretty skinny and it never made any sense to call me Fireplug. Bean-pole would certainly be more fitting.

I edged my way toward Billy Bob, until I could finally see the squirrel he had apparently run up the tree. It was just like him to torment tiny, defenseless creatures.

The squirrel was sitting on one of the lower branches. It was gazing down at Billy Bob as he cussed at it, and otherwise tried to intimidate it into coming out of the tree.

The squirrel wouldn’t budge, though, but it began to chatter down at Billy Bob rather angrily.

The chattering sound a lot like laughing, and Billy Bob became irate. His chubby cheeks grew a dark shade of pink, and he started to sputter his words so that you couldn’t understand them. Finally he was so enraged he lunged at the tree trunk, grabbed it with his fat hands, and tried to shake the entire tree. Now, Billy Bob was big, but nobody was big enough to shake that old oak tree. He just looked ridiculous in the attempt, and as though the squirrel recognized what a big dummy Billy Bob was, it chattered even louder.

Billy Bob, then, gave up on the tree, and started looking for rocks to hurl at the squirrel.

“Hey, why don’t you just leave it alone?” I called out to him.

He just looked up to glare at me, and then resumed scanning the ground for good throwing stones.

When he had a good supply of ammo piled at his feet, he started to chuck the stones at the squirrel, who ran to and fro on the branch, evading the rocks, stopping now and then to chatter fiercely.

I called out to Billy Bob that he would never hit the squirrel, and he spun round and threw a stone that hit me right in the kneecap before he returned his attention to the squirrel.

In the end the squirrel seemed to become bored with Billy Bob, so it scampered down the opposite side of the tree trunk, and started to bolt across an open grassy area of the park.

Surprisingly Billy Bob took after it, running a lot faster than I would have thought somebody his size could run.

I just had to chase after them, because I had this feeling something was going to happen. Either Billy Bob was going to catch that squirrel, or he would fall flat on his face, or something. What ended up happening, I would never have guessed.

The squirrel was zigzagging out in front of Billy Bob, who little by little closed the gap. Just when it seemed Billy Bob had a shot at grabbing the squirrel, it stopped dead in its tracks, spun round, and lunged at Billy Bob. There was a horrifying squeal as the squirrel sunk its teeth into Billy Bob’s hand, and then Billy Bob was spinning around and around, like a dust devil dancing across a desert floor, trying to get the squirrel to let go, and the squirrel holding on for dear life.

When the squirrel finally let go, it flew off, hit the ground running, and took off for parts unknown.

Billy Bob ended up sitting on the ground, wailing like a baby. He was holding his hand close to his chest, and blood was fairly gushing out of the wound that was in the meaty part between his thumb and pointing finger. I couldn’t say that I felt the least bit of sympathy for him. It served him right.

I walked up to him, thinking that that squirrel had left him much the same way Billy Bob left the many little kids he had tormented.

“Wow, Billy Bob,” I said, savoring the moment, “that squirrel sure did have long teeth, hunh?”

When he looked up, I could see that his fat cheeks were shiny with tears. All he could say was “I’m bleeding…I’m bleeding…” repeating it in a panicky pathetic way. I almost hated myself, then, because I actually started to feel sorry for him. I couldn’t have said why. I was certain he had never felt anything at all after he’d torment some little kid, leaving him scraped and banged-up in the school yard.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m sure they can stitch that up all right. You might hafta get rabies shots, though.”

His eyes bugged out in terror. “R-rabies…?”

“You know that squirrels carry rabies, don’t you?”

He gasped, seeing the truth of what I’d said, struggled frantically to his feet, and fled from the park, calling for his mother long before he was even near his home.

I walked after him. There was no way I was going to miss any part of his comeuppance.

By the time I reached his house Billy Bob was already gone. His father had run him over to the Oland County Bariatric Center, which was the only nearby medical facility that had anything that remotely resembled an emergency room. I thought it was ironic– and potentially practical– that he was taken to the Bariatric Center. Maybe after they fixed his hand, they could also staple his stomach– maybe he could get some kind of two-for deal.

Billy Bob’s mother was standing on the rickety old porch that hadn’t been painted in years. She was a formidable woman– meaning that Billy Bob had inherited his disposition from her– and the spitting image of her son. Appearance-wise, the only things that separated the two were thirty years of wear and midnight snacks and a sex-change operation.

She was talking down to a sheriff’s deputy, who had apparently just arrived and who seemed reluctant to get too close to the house.

As I approached, Billy Bob’s mother spotted me, and pointed an accusing finger in my direction.

“I betcha he had something to do with it,” she said to the deputy, who was pretty young and looked way too serious.

“You know what this is all about?” the deputy asked. “Billy Bob was so frantic he couldn’t speak.”

“Oh, he did something, all right,” she said, certain. “He even looks guilty.”

It always struck me as strange that the parents of the kids who were doing the worse things always believed that it was other folks’ kids who were at fault.

“Hey, I didn’t do nothing,” I said to them both. “He was squirrel-bit.”

At that they both gasped, as though getting squirrel-bit was the worse thing that could befall a human being.

“Aw, that ain’t good,” the deputy said gravely, and looked to have a shiver running through him. “We’re gonna need to find that squirrel. If not, Billy Bob is gonna hafta go through a mess of painful shots. Thirteen injections right in the solar plexus…. Did you see this happen?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

He took a small notepad and a pen from his shirt pocket, and got ready to write.

“Gimme a description of the squirrel,” he almost demanded.

“What?”

“What did it look like.”

“Well…it looked like– a squirrel.” I thought it was a really stupid question; Oland County only had one type of squirrel, and they were reddish-brown and all looked alike. It sounded as though young deputy was expecting the squirrel to have a moustache or walk with a limp– I concluded that he was not detective material. But then I remembered, “It did have a messed up tail.” The tip of its tail had been sparse of fur, remindful of the quality of Christmas trees you might find at six o’clock on Christmas eve evening at a cut-rate tree lot.

I described the squirrel tail to him, and he seemed happy to have something to jot down.

The whole while Billy Bob’s mother glared down at me as though I did something wrong.

It didn’t take long before every deputy on duty, and sheriff himself, along with a few file clerks from the County Building, were all combing the park for a small reddish-brown squirrel with a ratty tail.

They check up trees, behind bushes, around the river where it squiggled through a south corner of the park. They checked around the softball diamonds, the park house, and the two small bathroom buildings whose doors were always open in the summer months. And though many squirrels were spotted, and there were a few false alarms, the offending squirrel remained at large.

The deputies then fanned out into the downtown area on one side of the park, and into the residential neighborhood on the other side of the park.

They checked every tree and bush. They checked tool sheds and garages. They checked all the roofs of any structure. They even checked inside the small downtown stores and offices, as though the squirrel had actually pushed open one of the doors to let itself into the genuine air-conditioning that was advertised in faded letters on the front window.

I was requested to make myself available to identify the culprit once it was captured, since Billy Bob was still at the emergency room and way too distraught to be of much use.

I wandered around watching the hunt, and I noticed how deeply concerned everybody was. You’d think they were doing it all for some kind of saint, and not for Billy Bob, who, it was generally known, was a “bad seed.” I wondered what they could possibly be thinking. It really was an awful message I was picking up from their actions: that it didn’t matter how bad, even evil, a person might be, he was still deserving of their sympathy and concern if he was bitten by a rabid, or might-be rabid, squirrel. They were basically saying that when push came to shove, it didn’t matter how you have comported yourself in life, everybody would look after you. And though this was a comforting idea, it seemed to make meaningless every good, kind, and decent thing I’d ever done.

Then, as if that weren’t a hard enough pill to swallow, I spied Sister Margaret Olive, who had joined in the search.

But it was Wordell Jackson who ultimately found the squirrel.

As I strolled down a road not far from my house, I noticed Wordell had pulled his squad car over, and was now standing before a small house that had a large front yard. He was peering into the yard, and when I got closer, I saw the squirrel just as it jump onto the top of the white picket fence.

Wordell noticed me, and slowly raised his hand, warning me not to come any further.

The squirrel, perched on the fence, stopped, and looked more like a ceramic squirrel than a real one. When it finally moved, it stood on its hind legs, turning to face Wordell, who seemed unsure what to do at first.

Then he looked toward me, and moved his eyes between the squirrel and me, as though asking whether this was the right squirrel. When I nodded my head, he carefully reached down for his service revolver, and pulled it from his holster. Now he appeared more uncertain than ever, and with good reason. You see, Wordell was, without a doubt, the worse shot the Oland County Sheriff’s Department had ever employed. Each year, all the deputies had to qualify on the shooting range, and were expected to get at least the minimal passing score of eighty. In the ten plus years he had been a deputy, Wordell was hard-pressed to break fifty. He would always end up getting a pass until the following year, though; it would have been much too hard to replace him, simply because nobody wanted to be a deputy, what with all the more desirable jobs available in the county, like digging graves, greasing pump jacks, and hunting rattlesnakes whose meat was shipped to fine-to-do restaurants out east to be served as gourmet food to people with lots of money and very little common sense.

So, Wordell, knowing his limitations, slowly re-holstered his revolver, as the squirrel continued to look at him, not the least bit concerned, as though it could sense Wordell was no real threat.

Wordell eased back toward the squad car, and returned with a shotgun. He probably figured he had a better chance to wing the squirrel with a shotgun.

The squirrel, though, didn’t seem the least impressed with the change of hardware. It looked more curious than anything. It watched as Wordell drew a bead on it, and then waited.

When Wordell pulled the trigger, three things happened at the same time. There was a deafening roar from the shotgun. Wordell flew backward, and landed flat on his backside. And the squirrel disappeared.

At first I thought the squirrel made a miraculous escape, somehow jumping off the fence and running to hide in the nearby lilac tree. But then I saw that it hadn’t gotten away at all; just above where it had been standing, there was a pink squirrelly mist lingering in the air.

Everybody heard the sound of the shotgun blast, and came running. Soon the front yard was crawling with deputies, looking everywhere, but not finding a piece of the squirrel big enough to test to see whether it had had rabies.

The sheriff, disgusted, sent a deputy over to the emergency room to tell the doctors Billy Bob would be needing the rabies shots.

Wordell was sent over to the emergency room, too. He hadn’t been holding the shotgun right, and had apparently dislocated his shoulder.

Soon everybody was gone, and it seemed like just any other lazy summer day in Oland, where there was plenty of time and not a whole lot to do.

Ernest Hemingway once said a true story ends only in death.

But Billy Bob survived. His wound healed, and he got over the rabies shots. Within a week or so, he was back to his old ways, tormenting little kids and tiny creatures. None of it changed him at all. Everybody wants, even expects, bad people to change. I don’t think it ever really happens. If you’re born good, you stay good. If you’re born bad, you stay bad. If you can learn to life with this, you’ll never be disappointed.

Wordell did suffer a dislocated shoulder, but he, too, survived– although the sheriff, it was rumored, really wanted to kill him, because Wordell was rewarded for his stupidity by being able to stay home for six weeks at three-quarters pay on a duty injury.

The only one who died was the squirrel, who had to be the unluckiest creature on earth; first it’d been tormented by Billy Bob, and then shot and vaporized by somebody, who, it was widely known, couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with a howitzer. You don’t get much more unlucky than that.

As far as this story ending in a death, I wonder if the squirrel counts. I really hope it does.

I stopped in the girls’ room to try to bush out my hair before my first class.

I loved the girls’ room. I always found comfort in the way sounds echoed off the tiled walls. There was peace here, except, of course, when two girls were fighting over some guy who was usually not the least bit interested in either one of them. Or when somebody with a tin ear broke out in song, thinking the acoustics of the room would make their voice sound human. When I was a freshman, I spent hours in the girls’ room. It was my getaway from the classes I hated and routinely cut, which was pretty much all of them. I think I was going through some kind of phase. I was rebelling or something. Finally Assistant Principle Art Whit, whom everybody called Whitless, threatened to call my parents in for a meeting if I didn’t stop cutting classes. So that was pretty much that. The last thing I wanted was sympathy from the school’s administrative tight-ass. I could see him looking down his long thin nose at me, and saying, “I met with your parents, and, damn, is there anything I can do for you? I never realized… no wonder you hide in the bathroom all the time….” Really, I’d have to slit my wrists on the spot.

I stood by the sinks and bushed my hair. The bush kept getting caught in the tangles. Something fell out, and I freaked. It looked like a corn bug. It dropped in the sink and scuttled down the drain.

Just then, Trixie Allen walked into the bathroom. Trixie was sort of chubby, sort of blah, and sort of my best friend. I figured you should never pick a best friend you actually like. Then if you break up, you really don’t lose much. The flaw in my reasoning, though, is that until you break up you really don’t have very much. And that was Trixie—not very much.

She stood next to me and checked herself out in the mirror. I was surprised she even bothered. She had a hopelessly round face and dull brown eyes. Her hair was her best feature, and for that she had to pay big bucks to have styled and dyed reddish-brown, sometimes with a blue or green streak.

Her real name was Virginia, which she totally hated. She said it sounded as though she had been named after a state. Who knew why she thought Trixie was any better? To me, Trixie sounded like the name of an 83-year-old prostitute.

After checking herself out, she looked over at me in the mirror.

“Hey, what’s with you?” she asked. “You look a little green.”

“My parents drove me to school,” I said.

“No!” she gasped. “And you let them?”

I shrugged. “They insisted.”

“Don’t they know what they do to us?” she wondered.

She always talked as though her parents were as bad as mine. It wasn’t even close. In the defective-parent contest I couldn’t be beat.

Actually Trixie’s parents always seemed pretty normal to me. They bought Trixie a car for her sixteenth birthday, and not any twenty-year-old beater that smelled of chicken feathers, either. They bought her a new Camaro. I couldn’t even remember what I got for my sixteenth birthday. I was probably better off not remembering. Dad was not logical when it came to gifts. Last Christmas he installed a padded toilet seat in our bathroom. That was his gift to the family—no kidding. To him that was a big deal. Give the gift that keeps giving, or in this case keeps cushioning everybody’s butt. Merry Christmas! Ho, ho, ho!

“I can’t believe my parents,” Trixie said, rolling her eyes.

“Do tell,” I said, as though I could actually stop her.

“It’s, like, they want to be my buddies, you know? You ever have that problem?”

“Heaven forbid,” I said.

“My mom asked if she could go with to that end-of-summer bon fire. She was serious, too. Can you imagine your mom and you, together, at a bon fire?”

I tried. The only thing I knew for sure was that somebody would have ended up with a nice knit stocking cap. Everything else was a blur of knitting needles and burning wood.

“Nope,” I said.

“Yeah, me either.”

“Your parents aren’t so bad, Trix.”

“Please.”

“Really.”

“You have no idea,” she said. “But, you know, I don’t take anything from those people.”

“You go, girl.”

“Yeah.”

“No, I mean really, go,” I said, pointing at the door. “Get. Shoo-shoo-shoo.”

Her dull face seemed offended.

“Well, if you’re going to be that way…” She turned away. Before she walked out, she said, “You act like that, you ain’t going to have any friends.”

“Things are looking up all the time,” I said to myself.

I finished brushing my hair. It was as good as it was going to get. I paused and shut my eyes and enjoyed the last bit of silence that bathroom had to offer.

“Hey, I forgot to ask you…”

I ground my teeth, and opened my eyes. Trixie was poking her head back through the door.

“Didn’t I tell you shoo?”

“Are you signing up to work on the haunted house?” she persisted.

I failed to see why your friends always seem to be obsessed with what you’re going to do.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said irritably. “Now get! I need my quiet time.”

She left—again. I leaned back against the sink, and shut my eyes. Then, before I could feel any kind of tranquility, the class bell sounded loudly. I sighed, and grabbed my brush and books, and headed for my first class.

I just couldn’t seem to find the least bit of peace in my life. That was the entire problem. If I only had enough peace, everything would be just fine.

2. He won’t wear any footwear other than cowboy boots.

3. He named his pet dog or cat after his last girlfriend.

4. The remains of his last meal are in the truck of his car.

5. He uses coupons during a date.

6. He thinks it’s fun to go to a scrap yard and watch old cars being crushed.

7. He informs you that you won’t be able to meet his parents until they get out of prison.

8. He owns a sock puppet.

9. He has a sister who looks just like you.

10. He talks too much about all the good times he had in high school.

11. He always uses both hands while eating a meal.

12. He ran away from home when he was twenty-seven.