Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet Read online

  I knew where this was leading, and now wasn’t the time for one of Walt’s Penthouse Forum stories; Salisbury was waiting with the others in the Minnie Winnie.

  I slung the strap of my camping bag over my shoulder.

  “Walt,” I said, “I’ve gotta get.”

  “It should be me going with her,” Walt said, suddenly looking very old.

  “I’ll make sure nothing happens to her,” I promised him.

  “You’re a good man, Reggie.”

  “I reckon I have my moments. But I’m not doing this just for you and your maybe-daughter.” Walt cocked an eyebrow. “Think about it. All this time we’ve thought the Bigelow Skunk Ape was just a myth. And who the hell knows, maybe it is. But what if it isn’t? Then that’s a whole new species we’ve discovered.”

  “Maybe you can name it after Lester? Swashus Retardus.”

  “This could be history in the making, Walt!”

  “Just what the world needs,” Walt said, “a man-eating monster that smells like a septic tank. You just watch your ass out there, son.”

  He’d never called me that before; I choked down a lump in my throat.

  Then I said, “You, uh … you didn’t know my momma, did you, Walt?”

  He waggled his eyebrows. “Just a turn of phrase.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief, we shook hands, and then I headed for the door.

  “Reggie, wait—”

  Walt fetched the shotgun from under the slab. I took it with a grim nod of thanks. “Mind yourself around Salisbury,” he said. “I don’t trust him.”

  Of course, Walt didn’t trust his own mother.

  “I’ll see you, Walt.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “Can’t speak for Salisbury,” I said, “but Lester and Eliza? One night in those Sticks and they’ll be begging to come home. Two nights tops, I reckon. Any longer than that … ?” I gave my best shit-eating grin. “Call the President.”

  I went outside to the Minnie Winnie. Salisbury gunned the engine as I climbed inside. “I thought that damned skunk ape would die of old age before you’d be ready,” he said.

  “Just drive,” I said, and as we pulled away, I glanced in the wing mirror and saw Walt raising his hand in farewell.

  At least, that’s what I’d thought at the time. Later I’d realise he’d been clutching my cellphone—and our only connection to the outside world.

  * * *

  Bigelow will never be mistaken for a metropolis, but as the Minnie Winnie left town, and we ventured out into the Sticks, I was struck by the palpable sense we were leaving civilization far behind us. Perhaps I was getting carried away. It’d been some years since I’d hunted or camped in the Sticks, and I’ll admit I was excited. The woods were deserted, not a soul in sight. Despite most townsfolk having decided by now that Lester murdered Ned and then blamed it on the skunk ape to cover his tracks, it seemed no one was taking any chances.

  Salisbury was driving, Eliza riding shotgun. She wore cutoff denim shorts, the scratches on her legs like scabby fishnet stockings, and a cowgirl shirt knotted above the navel. Her bare feet were propped on the dashboard as she painted her toenails Pepto-Bismol pink. Every once in a while she’d glance up from her piggies and tell Salisbury left or right or straight on. Salisbury didn’t seem to appreciate taking directions from a woman, nor that she had her feet on the dash, but he needed someone to navigate, because by now Lester was half past shitfaced, and so even less reliable than a lady navigator.

  I was trapped with Lester at the camper’s kitchenette table. Lester was wearing a Bigelow Baboons cap and a T-shirt he’d doctored with a Sharpie pen so it read THE SKUNK APE DID IT! All he’d brought with him were his video camera, to document our skunk ape safari, and a rapidly diminishing crate of Keystone. He seemed marginally comforted by Salisbury’s arsenal of skunk apeing weapons—and the beer was emboldening him—but it didn’t stop Lester from whining. Between slurps of beer, Lester took pains to remind me that he was here under duress, and against his wishes, and that we all should be grateful he had deigned to join us—

  “For pity’s sake, Lester,” I said. “Would you shut the fuck up?”

  We reached the clearing around noon. I recognized the place from Lester’s video. There was the log over which Eliza had been splayed while Boogaloo Baboon had his way with her. The log seemed sullied somehow. I averted my eyes and glared at Lester. “What?” he said.

  Salisbury ground the Minnie Winnie to a halt and killed the engine. He marched past Lester and me to the back of the camper and began rummaging through his supplies. Then he hauled out a rifle the size of a Howitzer.

  “What the hell is that?” I exclaimed. “An elephant gun?”

  Smiling proudly, Salisbury said: “Mr. Levine, I’d like you to meet the Nitro Express .700 double-rifle, the most powerful hunting gun in the world.” He began loading the giant gun with shells the size of Cuban cigars. “Each shell weighs 1,000 grains, hitting the target at 2,000-feet per second. That’s 9,000 foot-pounds of muzzle energy. You could stop a charging bull-elephant with a single shot, make ole Dumbo fly without his magic feather.”

  “Hoooleee shit,” Lester said. “Can I fire it?”

  I answered for Salisbury: “No fucking way.”

  Salisbury chuckled and said, “I’m afraid not, son. Each one of these bullets costs a hundred bucks. A hundred bucks which, not to be unkind, you don’t have.”

  Lester ceded the point with a nod.

  “Besides,” Salisbury said, “this bitch has gotta helluva kick. Ten times anything you’ve ever fired. She’s liable to wrench your arms clean out of their sockets.”

  As he climbed from the camper, Salisbury told us: “Now stay behind me.”

  Lester took those words to heart and refused to move from the camper until I shoved him out the door. I considered leaving Walt’s shotgun in the camper. Compared to Salisbury’s cannon, I was a little ashamed of it. Plus I wasn’t sure if we were hunting skunk ape or snipe here, and I figured the fewer jumpy idiots waving guns around, the better. But in the end, like a good American, I brought it with me.

  We watched in silence as Salisbury stalked the clearing with the elephant gun braced before him. He scanned the ground for tracks; sniffed the air for a scent. Eliza pointed a trembling hand towards the thicket of brush where the skunk ape had run off with Ned. Hesitating outside the thicket, Salisbury cocked his head and listened intently. He made a ‘follow me’ gesture and inched forwards into the brush, sweeping bushes from his path with the enormous barrels of his gun. Eliza went after him. I glanced behind me. “Let’s go, Lester.” We followed behind Salisbury as he stalked through the brush with the elephant gun thrust before him—

  Suddenly he stopped, holding up his fist.

  We froze; I grabbed Lester’s shirt to stop him fleeing back to the camper.

  “What is it?” I whispered to Salisbury.

  He crouched down on his haunches and untangled a burr of black fur that was snagged in some thorns. He wafted the burr under his nose, inhaling deeply. His nostrils flared and his head jerked back reflexively. “Christ on His throne!”

  “Let me see that,” I said, crouching down beside him.

  Salisbury passed me the burr like he was eager to be rid of it.

  I took a quick whiff, turned my head and heaved.

  “That’s no skunk ape,” I gasped, “that’s Ned’s Boogaloo costume.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “You never forget that.”

  I looked back at Lester and Eliza.

  “Randy-Ray should have found this. Didn’t he search back here?”

  Lester shook his head bitterly. “Randy-Ray and his searchers hardly moved from the clearing back there. Loafing around on the log, laughing about the Eliza and Boogaloo part of the video. One of the sonsofbitches was pumping his hips in the air like he was getting him some imaginary Eliza. I bet them bastards had already made up their minds I kille
d Ned out of jealousy.”

  “What about the coonhounds?”

  “Ned’s Boogaloo outfit must’ve thrown ‘em off.”

  I could see, not to mention smell, how that was possible.

  I brushed the fur ball from my hands and wiped my palms on my jeans. When I sniffed my fingers, I could still smell Ned’s Boogaloo suit on them, and my guts lurched. How Eliza had stomached the stench, I did not know. Nobody could deny that she’d paid her dues on her quest to become a porn starlet.

  “Well?” I said to Salisbury.

  “Quiet!” he hissed.

  He handed me the elephant gun. My knees stiffened under the weight. Damn thing weighed a ton. Never mind an elephant, you could’ve clubbed a T-Rex to death just with the stock. Salisbury unsheathed the machete-sized knife on his hip and began hacking at the brush. Raking the trimmings aside, he clawed away the undergrowth to reveal a monstrous bare footprint cratered in the earth.

  “And that, Mr. Levine?” Salisbury’s eyes blazed zealously. “Is that from a ‘Boogaloo Baboon’ costume?” I could only shake my head; I’d never seen the like of the huge print. When I placed my foot next to it, it dwarfed my size 12s. The size of the print, it might’ve been left by the Monty Python foot. “Lady and gentlemen,” Salisbury declared, “we have us a skunk ape.”

  Lester said, “We’re gonna need a bigger Winnebago—”

  I said to him, “Get a shot of this with your camera, dumbass.”

  Lester warily approached, the video camera shaking in his hands, as if he expected the footprint would somehow come to life and kick him in the butt.

  I saw Salisbury striding away. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to the camper, there’s much work to be done.”

  “Wait—uh—don’t you want to take a plaster cast of this print?”

  He looked at me like I was stark raving mad. “Whatever for?”

  “I don’t know …” I said, sheepishly. “Science or something?”

  He gave a savage laugh.

  “Once I deliver the beast dead,” Salisbury said, “the scientists can study it to their hearts’ content.”

  “You’re just going to kill it?”

  “And then empty my bladder on its stinking carcass.”

  He strode towards me. “Let’s get something clear right now, Mr. Levine. I’m not here to capture or chronicle this creature. I’m here to return it to hell where it belongs.”

  “What about Ned?” Eliza said.

  “And perhaps to get your friend back alive,” Salisbury added as an afterthought.

  “Now,” he continued, “any man or woman who has a problem with that ought to say so now—”

  Lester raised his hand. “Yeah, I wanna go home.”

  “Because once we’re out there on its trail,” Salisbury went on, “once the hunt is joined, there’s no turning back—”

  Lester said, “If you could just drop me off at The Henhouse—” “Your lives will depend on you doing exactly what I say when I say it—” “Why’s no one listening to me?” Lester whined. Salisbury fixed his gaze upon me. “Are we clear?” I nodded. He grinned. “Then let’s go bag this bastard.”

  10

  Now I’m no skunk aper, but I’ve hunted before, mostly squirrel, and it wasn’t long before I began to question Salisbury’s methods, and wonder what the hell we’d gotten into here.

  Salisbury was manning the lawn chair fitted to the camper’s roof. His feet were propped on the loudspeaker. The stock of the elephant gun was nestled against his crotch, the barrels jutting up from between his thighs like a magnificent steel phallus. Scanning the woods through binoculars, gnawing a stick of beef jerky to maintain his energy levels, Salisbury barked directions over the engine noise.

  Eliza was driving the camper. At Salisbury’s command, she’d press a button on the dashboard console to activate the loudspeaker, and a godawful honking yowl would echo over the woods. It sounded like Ric Flair being sodomized by a moose with its pecker greased in pepper spray. Salisbury claimed it was a close approximation of a skunk ape’s mating call—or at least, the best impression he could do. And who were we to argue with him? He was the expert.

  Lester had by now passed out drunk. I might’ve been grateful for the brief respite from his endless whining, except that left me alone on bait detail.

  The camper’s rear window was raised, and I was pouring out slop from the bait buckets, gagging at the foul stench despite the bandana covering my nose and mouth. A rancid stream of rust-colored slurry glistened in the wake of the Minnie Winnie. So far the stench had failed to attract the skunk ape, and if there was a skunk ape out here, it seemed impossible he could have missed it; what it had attracted was a biblical swarm of flies, trailing the camper like gulls behind a fishing trawler.

  It was at times like this that I wondered what my old friend Boar Hog Brannon was up to nowadays. After he whipped me, I’d followed his progress in the boxing journals. I might have felt better about the loss if he’d gone on to have a long and illustrious career, retiring undefeated as light heavyweight champion of the world. But after steamrollering me, Boar Hog made only a brief appearance in the top twenty ranks, losing a wide points decision to Chick Estevez, before he vanished into obscurity. Still, a guy like Boar Hog always landed sunny side up. I imagined he probably owned a successful restaurant or car dealership. He lived in a nice big house, had a wife with nice big jugs, and sired a litter of husky piglets. Wherever Boar Hog was now, I felt confident he wasn’t slopping out buckets of shit that smelled worse than the River Styx.

  I was prising the lid off another bait bucket when the camper hit a bump on the trail. Sludge spewed from the bucket, slopped over my boots.

  “Damn it, Eliza!” I kicked the shit off my boots. “Watch where you’re going!”

  “Sorry, Mr. Levine.” She gave me a sheepish smile in the rearview.

  With an angry glance at Lester, I considered waking him, letting him take his turn on bait detail. He was sprawled across the kitchenette’s bench seat, snoring like a bear gone down for winter. “Mind if I ask you something?” I said to Eliza. “What exactly do you see in this clown?”

  She gazed adoringly at Lester. “Oh, you don’t know him, Mr. Levine. No one knows Lester like I do. He’s my knight in shining armor.”

  As if on cue, Lester scratched his nuts, cut a long fart like a sheet being torn in half, rolled over on the bench seat, and then continued to snore.

  A chivalrous knight? I couldn’t see it myself.

  “Lester rescued me from the mongoloid hospital,” Eliza explained.

  “Oh …” I managed to say.

  I wondered if Walt knew about this. There had to be a law against hiring mongoloids as strippers, and if there wasn’t, there ought to have been.

  Reading my expression, she giggled. “I wasn’t a patient, silly! I was a comfort nurse.”

  “You’ve got a nursing license? Then what the hell are you stripping for?”

  “Comfort nurses don’t need a nursing license.”

  “Comfort nurse … That’s like, a hospice worker or something?”

  “Oh no,” she chortled, “nothing like that. Nope, I was jacking off the mongoloids.”

  “Come again?”

  The bait fumes must have been making me heady, because it sounded like she’d said—

  “Remember Melvin Stott?” Eliza went on. “When he escaped from the mongoloid hospital? They found him out at Planter’s hog farm?”

  I remembered, alright. The kid had butt-fucked five hogs before the squealing woke Herb, he went outside to investigate, discovered Melvin balls-deep in Bessie, his prize sow, and put him to sleep with the stock of his scattergun. Herb never recovered from what he witnessed that night, sold his hog farm and took to the bottle, drinking himself to death under the bridge on old Highway 9.

  “After Melvin Stott,” Eliza said, “the hospital chiefs put measures in place to ensure nothing like that ever happened again. They hired me on
as a comfort nurse to take the steam off them boys.” She rolled her shoulder, as if her arm had stiffened at the memory of the labor. “And I’m happy to report that we never lost another one.” She raised her chin proudly. “Not on my watch.”

  Jesus H. Christ … First dopey Ned in his baboon costume, now card-carrying mongoloids. And this was the girl I’d figured was out of my league.

  She must’ve seen the way I was looking at her because she said, “A mongoloid’s got needs just the same as any other man, Mr. Levine. And it really wasn’t as bad as you think. We just strapped ‘em down to their cots. Double restraints. Cuz that retard strength, it ain’t no myth. Then I pulled on the rubber glove and had at it. And not to toot my own horn, but I got real good at it too. I could finish ‘em off in just a few short strokes. Shoot, sometimes they’d pop their cork as soon as they saw me pulling on the glove. The doc said it reminded him of Pavlova’s dog. Said he might like to write a paper on it someday. Anyway, when I finished ‘em off, they were calm as little lambs, all sweet and subdued and good as gold.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t believe the hospital has a practice like this …” I also couldn’t believe Eliza made being strapped down in the mongoloid ward sound like an appealing proposition.

  She rolled her eyes at me. “They don’t exactly advertise the fact. Well, apart from the want-ad I saw in the Bugle. And the want-ad was kinda vague about what the job actually entailed. Like a cryptic crossword clue …

  “Anyway,” she said, “Lester was working at the hospital as an orderly—”

  “Lester Swash was gainfully employed?”

  I found that harder to believe than the skunk ape.

  She gave a knowing smile. “He didn’t last long,” she admitted. “But before they canned him, Lester would keep me company while I worked.”

  I’ll bet he did, I thought; he probably regretted not having his video camera handy to film Eliza hard at work.

  “Lester said I had talent and I should set my sights higher.”