• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
CRAWLING HOME TO DIE
There was a law against burning garbage in town but Bud didn't give a hot shit whatthose assholes on the town council thought. He crammed another cardboard box of garbage down into burn can and stirred it with his hoe. His house was barely in the citylimits anyways and his neighbors sure as shit weren't going to complain. Bud for years had been the neighbor drunk, seems like every neighborhood has at leastone. Quick with a joke and a slap on the back. Funny and harmless. Him and Hazel, hiswife, were like fixtures sitting out on the back porch when the weather was decent,listening to the Twins on a cheap transistor radio and killing a case of Grain Belt in anight. They weren't your lay in the gutter with puke on the shirt and a turd in the pantskind of drunks. Bud was a foreman at the packing plant and Hazel ran her own beauty parlor in the basement. They worked everyday and went to church every Sunday nomatter how crippling the hangover. Paid their bills on time. Respectable folk. But notanymore. The neighbors were leery if not goddamn outright afraid of Bud now.Everything changed when Hazel caught the lung cancer and died. The x-rays of inside of her lungs looked she had inhaled a can of black paint. Three packs a day of Chesterfieldsa day will do that to you. From the day the doctor broke the bad news to the day the boysfrom Bonnerup's Funeral Home picked her up and hauled her out on a gurney coveredwith a cheap white sheet that the funeral home charged Bud fifty bucks for, it was onlytwo months. To the day. Bud changed overnight from the funny drunk to the bitter, mean kind of drunk. Switchedfrom beer to Johnny Walker Red. Smashed up his car. Lost his license. Punched out aneighbor whose dog took a crap on Bud's lawn. Threw his radio threw the picturewindow of his house when the Twins blew another one in the bottom of the ninth. Thecops started to make visits to the house at night when it was reported that Bud wascarrying a gun around neighborhood threatening to blow any son of a bitch who crossedhim right out of his shit stained Fruit of the Looms. "Naeve Hospital has a good program going on up there," the cop had told Bud, "help youout with your problems." That may be what the cop said but Bud heard, "They’ll put youin a paper gown and matching slippers, talk to you about what’s going on in your head."Bud had told the cop to piss up a rope and to mind his own fucking business.It all came to a head on September 11th. Hazel had been in the ground for almost fivemonths and Bud still hadn't been able to get hold of their only surviving son to let himknow the bad news. As if the ungrateful little bastard would even care anyway. The boycame back from Viet Nam all fucked up in the head. Couldn't settle down. His eyes werehaunted, his body twitchy. Was always hoofing it all over the goddamn world. Now helived somewhere down in Florida somewhere, last Bud heard was in Pensacola, on asailboat for Christ's sake! No phone. No fixed address. Bud had no idea what he did for money. All he knew right then was that the mailman had just brought Bud's latest letter 
 
 back with the words "UNDELIVERABLE AT THIS ADDRESS" stamped on it. Bud and Hazel’s first son, Dennis, had died young and hard. Not even seventeen, he had broken into the high school with some idiot friends of his and had torn the place up. Took a big shit on the principal’s desk. One of the kids cut himself on a broken window andspilled his guts out at the emergency room. Dennis got sentenced to a year at Red Wing,the state reformatory in Minnesota. Second night there he got buttfucked in the showers by some hardcases from Minneapolis. He fought back a little too hard for them, so theyslit his throat and shoved a bar of Ivory up his ass.When Bud poured a stiff one over ice and sat down and turned on the television on thatfateful September day, the Twin Towers were smoldering in front of him. There wasn'tanything else on the tube for the whole day - since Bud didn't believe in paying for cable- and Bud sat in front of it, transfixed, chasing shots of Johnny Red with cold GrainBelts. By the time the sun had gone down Bud had made up his mind. This whole mess of shit that was going on in New York was a sign. Maybe from God himself. A signal thatlife was short, could end at anytime. Hazel sure as shit found that out. Bud was going tostart life afresh in the morning. He was going to quit drinking. Quit smoking. Start going back to church. Find him a woman. He couldn't remember the last time he had knockedthe dust off of a pussy or had even popped wood for that matter.But first he was going to get rid of everything of Hazel's and his no good son's so that hewouldn't have to be reminded of the heartache of his past. And he not only was going toget rid of it, he was going to burn the shit. Make a fucking statement. Fuck the nosey assneighbors! A bottle of Red label and a twelve of beer will do that to you.It will also make you miss the fact that the last box you stuffed down into the goldenflames and were currently stirring around with an old garden hoe had six full cans of hairspray from your wife's beauty parlor in it.The sound of the explosion was like a mortar round going off and the force of the blasttook Bud's head clean off.Two days later down in the Keys in a bar called Captain Tony's, a man nursing his firstice vodka of the morning, saw his father's face up on the television screen. Jesus HermanChrist! Was he going through DTs? He hadn't seen the old bastard in over twenty yearsand there he was on CNN. What a fucking world we live in! The newscaster, who lookedlike she might have a side career in porno flicks, was trying to conceal a smirk while shedescribed his demise.***It had been a bitch getting through the airport. Flying out of Key West on the puddle jumper had been nothing. A troll like woman who was suppose to be watching the x-raymachine had literally been sleeping at her post when he boarded his flight. And just after that shit in New York! But the flight out of Miami to Minneapolis had been a whole new
 
 ballgame. Security was tight as hell and he had been lucky that he stuffed his pistol intohis check on bag and the minimum wage security guard had missed it. Of course, theguard was Cuban. The whole goddamn state was literally crawling with them. SinceCastro had outsmarted that idiot peanut farmer president and took all of the scrotumheads out of his prisons and shipped them off to the Florida on one massive boatlift,Miami had gone to hell in a fucking hand-basket.The conspiracy freaks were always babbling on about how the Cubans hired Oswald tokill Kennedy. What a crock of bullshit that was! In his line of work he had worked with anumber of Cubans. They were stone cold killers with not an ounce of mercy in their souls, and smart as hell. If they had wanted Kennedy dead they would have done itthemselves and not hired some retard like that goddamn Oswald.There wasn't a Cuban in sight in the Minneapolis airport that was for sure. Too fuckingcold for them up in this godforsaken state. The airport hadn't changed much in all theseyears. Last time he was here had been when he had flown back from Viet Nam, but therental car joint was still in the same place. The bimbo behind the counter dropped her upgrade shtick when she saw the look in his eyes. The economy class would do justfucking fine, thank you.It was just under a hundred miles south to his hometown. It seemed to pass in a blink of an eye. Whenever you didn’t want to be going somewhere it always seems like that. Andhe sure as shit didn’t want to be doing this. He never had the urge to ever go back home,never wanted to see the dump again. Snow up to your ass six months out of the year,temperatures so fucking cold your tires would go flat on one side, the packing plantmaking the whole town stink like a giant fart, why would he want to visit such paradise?Because his old man was dead. That’s why. He was going home to bury his father. Hedidn’t give a shit that he was dead. Hell no! The world was a better place without thedirty son of a bitch. To tell the truth he didn't have a realistic reason to be heading homeother than the fact that he had recently committed a fuckup of enormous proportions andhe could sense that his own end was near. He could remember as a kid when one of theneighbor's cats had gotten old and sick and had crawled down into the sewer to die.Maybe that's what he was doing.Going back home to die. Crawling back into the sewer.Jesus fucking Christ, how fucking stupid could he have been? Such a random act of fate.Strolling down the street of beautiful Pensacola, lit up on cocaine and shots of vodka,tasting freedom, enjoying the ocean breeze and the beautiful big titted women, seems likeevery broad had been getting fake jugs when he was off in the joint for the second time, just enjoying life, just enjoying not being locked down in a cell. Of course, the old prick didn’t look quite the same. Shit, he had aged a thousand years,was even walking with a cane while his wife dawdled along beside him. But it was him,there was no doubt in his fucking mind that it wasn’t him. Probably retired down here. He
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...