by
Robert T. Tuohey
Truly, it was the competition that brought about the obsession, the mutilation, the murder. Still, I was a fine tool in the hands of Fate, and here I would like to chronicle my part in that artistic process.
Certainly, there was nothing in Butch Mincer's spotted past to recommend him to the position of "morgue assistant": I took him into the hospital's employ solely on the basis of my strong intuition that he was a budding psychopath. As I glanced down at his all but blank application form, and then up at his dark, roaming eyes, and his muscular, agitated frame, I thought him naught but barbarity contained ~ or in need of direction.
As I say, at first sight of Butch I had no definite plan, but merely recognized in him a suitable arrow for the bow of my art. But what of a target? Ah, this was to be fashioned, better said, revealed, in the fullness of Time.
With my professional experience, Butch's dangerous abnormality would have been readily apparent even if grouped among other low-grade species; say, for example, a pro-wrestling crowd, or a mob of monster truck fans. Still, however, the depths, twists and turns of a particular mental pathology are subtle to sound, and so I probed about, gauging the psychologic toxins as the façade of my interview rolled on.
Satisfied at last that, indeed, the beneficent gods had dropped a true scorpion, and not a mere centipede, into my waiting net, I tossed the beast a morsel.
"Why do you want to work with our cadavers?" I asked point-blank.
His eyes, still keen with a nervous, brute sense, narrowed at this; but the couple of empty seconds that followed indicated that something was amiss. I rephrased for my lexically-challenged friend.
"The corpses," I said with a smile, and then took another step down, just to be sure. "Why do you want to work with dead bodies?"
"Yeah!" he grunted, giving a sly smile that glinted of chipped teeth, beautifully matching his scarred knuckles.
"Well, doc," said the inveterate bull-shitter, "seein' as the're dead, they ain't no trouble, I s'pose."
True, the man was no Shakespeare in manner of expression, but, sensitive reader, was not the thought contained therein latent with tragedy, festering with horror?
I hired Butch on the spot.
The handy fellow was put in the cold-storage of third-shift; here he would work with our "unclaimed deceased" (or "stray stiffs" as the night boys more truly tagged them). The nether regions of the hospital were presided over in the black hours by an officious little putz named John Endecott; this pseudo-doctor and social misfit I kept at my Plutonian beck and hest solely because I'd never found a suitable way to dispose of him.
On his first night of work, Butch was provided with a raggedy set of hospital whites, a shiny, laminated I.D. badge, a jangling ring of keys (later examined by myself), and a lengthy lecture on hospital rules by the universally reviled Dr. Endecott. Very soon, with very little nudging on my part, Butch was to hate this miscreant.
"He might wind up as one of our strays!" Butch growled to me one night as I happened to be passing through.
But, now, about the corpses. Amazing how these rapidly decaying annoyances pile-up in any large metropolitan hospital! What with the homeless, gang and drug related deaths, and let's not forget that horde of unattended elderly stiffs rotting away in obscurely numbered, seldom visited apartments ~ Well, the weary public hospital admin soon finds his hands, and his morgue, full.
And so, Butch was set to the task, under the authoritarian eye of Dr. Endecott, of storing and then later disposing of these unfortunates.
My tools in place, I now needed to begin laying the groundwork. The first item on the agenda was gaining Butch's full trust: to take him under my dark wing, to become a father figure, and so on. Concomitant with this tedious, if odiously amusing, task, was the search for my Cassio's Achilles.
This kind of psychological coolie-labor, this soap opera acting, was little to my taste. At least, however, the one feed into the other: in acquiring the dangerous buffoon's confidence, I simultaneously coaxed him into the noose.
Fortune smiles on the devious. Much more easily than anticipated, my intertwined serpents gave issue. I never bothered to ascertain whether it had been parental misguidance, a degraded social environment, accident, or the hand of god (given sufficient time and data, I am quite capable of differentiating these various antecedents), but Butch Mincer had long been obsessed with go-cart racing.
Being of refined taste and scholarly bent, I knew but little, and cared even less, how the local lowbrows squandered their free time. My new "pal", however, with the spotlight firmly trained upon the go-cart races, afforded me the complete picture. I listened attentively, all the while sporting a hideous grin.
The Friday and Saturday evenings of the summer months saw the nearby barbarians gather on the hill behind Clapbury Elementary School. The incline was a half-mile long, paved, and led up to the parking lot. Standing at the top, looking downhill, on the left side was a semi-wooded area; weekdays this was infested with urchins, nights with perverts. To the right, for a rough two miles, the land was natural swamp. Amidst the tall, rank grass and numerous shallow pools, various types of snake, the deadly water moccasin and copperhead leading, flourished. For some years the place had been used as an illegal dump, and thus rats were also prolific. A seven-foot chain link fence, garnished with the usual "Danger!" and "Keep Out!" signs, blocked off the entire area. Today, the whole mess has been buried beneath the cellophane of "Sunny Hill Condos"; then, however, everybody knew it as the Graveyard.
In his crude, laborious fashion, Butch led me to understand that the length, relative straightness, and increasing angle of descent, all made Mill Ridge Road (a k a the track) "perfect for go-carts". Incredible what pointless uses the common mind finds for the Earth. To think, an entire social event founded upon men whizzing down a half-mile hill in boxes with wheels!
But, to return. The first quarter mile of the track was admirably suited to the misuse to which it had been put, and it was here that the racers picked up their initial burst of speed. The next eighth mile, however, was a minefield of potholes. It was in this nasty patch that wheels flew off, carts veered wildly off-track crashing into the fence, trees, or slow, gaping fools. In fine, it was here, in Pothole Heaven, that all manner of hilariously dangerous accidents occurred. Naturally, this section was considered "best seats" and jam-packed.
There were other dangers, as well. The track, being in reality no more than an ordinary city street, was in no way wide enough to accommodate the exigencies of 5 speeding go-carts. Bone-cracking collisions were thus as common as traffic tickets. Moreover, the narrow sidelines, stuffed to overflow, with at least a third of the spectators being wandering children and stray dogs, provided the further sport the of the frequent last-second save of the innocent.
This carnival atmosphere was completed by flesh that was not gratis; for example, hamburgers and hotdogs. These delicacies were done to a tasty burn on portable gas and charcoal cookers, all strategically placed for optimum risk.
As these grotesque details were lengthily, though lucidly, given over to me by the all but slobbering Butch, the idea began to take shape in my mind that perhaps it was here that my conspiratorial knife might find its most artistic point of insertion.
"How long have you been attending these races, Butch?" I asked (my mind all asearch beneath my father-mask).
"Been goin' since I was a kid, but been racin' myself for seven years!" the good fellow proudly informed me. But then his thick-featured faced twisted into disgusted incredulity. "Never won though. Goddamn it!"
I smiled reassuringly. "But you may yet, Butch!"
As Tacitus among the barbarians, I decided it best to view one of these spectacles first hand. It was a sultry, sticky July evening with mosquitoes seemingly everywhere. On arrival, I discovered that the parking lot of a closed A&P had been commandeered. Although I was early, I still had trouble finding a spot, finally wedging my Lexus between a sleek black Camero and a broken-down pickup truck.
I had been vaguely concerned with the possibility of being recognized by some hospital poltroon, but as I limit my contact with these peons to an absolute minimum, and, as the Bard would have been pleased to see, the show was indeed the thing, my misgivings proved groundless. As events transpired, it was very fortunate that I was never spotted.
There was nothing in the way of preliminaries. The first group of racers simply rolled their jalopies up to the rudely painted white line while a nervous, self-important fellow with a bullhorn bellowed downhill: "Clear the track! Clear the goddamn track!" The crowd seemed largely oblivious to these overwrought exhortations, and merely continued its meandering shuffle.
Finally (whether due to some mysterious sign beyond my comprehension, or only because the bullhorn man no longer gave a rat's ass, I don't know), all was ready. A starter's gun was produced from Bull's sweaty back pocket, and the traditional count-off boomed at the straining racers and teeming crowd. Such was the tumult that I barely heard the crack that signaled the start.
As foretold, so it went. They crazily sped downhill, commonsense thrown to the dogs, first place the gateway to demented glory. Minor accidents, near-hits, and the like, served simply as foreplay, getting the crowd's blood up for the orgasm of the big crash. Sometimes it happened; sometimes it didn't. Ce la vie.
That night they did get their collective rocks off. In the second heat, a front wheel flew off unlucky number five, "Baker's Buns". He careened into the running crowd, then smashed dead-on into a large, much scarred elm. The cart was wrecked, but the moronic driver would live to tempt fate another day.
There was some trouble in extracting this freewheeling fool from his near coffin, jammed as he was in it. The tight fit was exacerbated by the bizarre array of prophylactic gear: football helmet, hockey mask, goalie gloves, tae kwon do chest protector, shin guards, and so on. As I later learned, this eclectic armor was de rigueur; but the drivers had difficulty stuffing themselves in at the starting line and pulling themselves out at the finishing line. Or the crash site.
Baker, looking like a reject from a backyard sports sale, was dragged out of his wreck. Unable to stand unassisted, utterly confused, with nose bloodily squashed all over his face, the good Samaritans ripped his cracked and dented helmet from his sagging head. Thereon, somebody, no doubt unqualified to even play a doctor on a second-rate soap opera, deemed the daredevil, "Ok.I guess."
I joined in the rousing applause for this robust display of stupidity.
I was then treated to another curious custom of this very curious sport. Whenever a cart was irredeemably wrecked, and particularly if the driver was badly hurt, the cart was considered "cursed" ~ they were horribly serious about this. The cart was then taboo, no parts even could be salvaged - it had to be immediately and specially junked. This junking procedure, actually more akin to a primitive ritual, was termed "graveyarding it".
As mentioned, the Graveyard was a fenced-off swampy area to the right of the track. Local legendry was rife with tales of little Johnny so-and-so or cute Mary what's-her-face wandering off into this forbidden place never to be seen again. Or, alternatively, in the more gruesome versions, to be discovered weeks later, nothing but a pile of rotting, vermin-ridden meat and bones, unidentifiable but for the Boy Scout's pocketknife (engraved J.S.), or a thread-thin golden anklet (sweet sixteen) still miraculously encircling the gnawed, bloody foot.
Now, to the best of my knowledge, these grim fairy tales were no more than the accumulated ramblings of many generations of would-be Bundys. The salient point, however, is that the local children, 9 to 90, imbibed this grisly fare with mama's milk.
Thus it was that the Graveyard was held to be the very Gates to Hell - the first and irrevocable step to Eternal Damnation. Amen.
The conclusion of all this is as Euclidean as it is ridiculous. As soon as the stunned driver had been pulled from his wreck, all around would begin to stamp and scream in unison.
"Graveyard it! Graveyard!"
The sentenced pronounced, the nearest men would rush forward snatching up the vile, accursed thing. These pieces were rushed to the high chain-link fence bordering the graveyard and there pell-mell tossed over.
Now the men, slapping high-fives and flinging gutter curses, would retreat, and the women and the children would get into the act. Howling like demons, they would attack the fence, giving full vent to their rage.
"Burn! Burn in Hell!"
"Cursed bitch! Roast!"
I saw women beat at the chain-links till their hands were bloodied; children, clawing and kicking at the impassive barrier, until their rage was spent, and then fall to the grass sobbing with impotent hate.
At last, this orgy of violence over, the women, staggered by their terrible exertions, would wearily pick up, pull, or drag their children away from the fence, falling back into the arms of their waiting men.
And then, for some awful moments, a deep, eerie silence would reign.
Of course, the profundity of this denouement depended not only on the ferocity of the crash, but also such external factors as moon phase, barometer pressure, and so on. As stated, the elements didn't always mesh, but when they did, as on that first night ~ the affect was sublime.
It was not until the near-end of the festivities, hard upon 11 pm, that I finally caught sight of my protégé. As my plan was still in embryonic form, its dark limbs just beginning to uncoil in the depths of my mind, I chose to remain cloaked in the folds of disguise, crowd, and night.
Thus concealed, I keenly watched as the thick hewed, thick-skulled Butch lumbered uphill to the starting line, his rough-rolling cart bumping in tow. Even from my limited vantage point Butch's handiwork resembled something crafted by a drunken blind man using discarded lumber and a dull ax. Indeed, even next to his fellow "ham-n-eggers" (as the aficionados termed the worst-of-the-worst), Butch's mobile was a sad joke.
Perhaps a third of the crowd had drifted away (beers and babes in hand, beds in mind) by the time the ham-n-eggers had lined up. Even the die-hards, drunks, and moms remaining seemed not to take these poor slobs too seriously, as the many catcalls and Bronx cheers testified. I, however, was all eyes.
The starter's gun cracked and away the cracked fools sped. Well, in a fashion. Compared with the zippy performances seen earlier, these jokers were indeed dead-dog slow. And none was slower than Butch. Alas, I'm sure a sugar-powered child on a good tricycle could have left him in the dust. As they moved downhill, I began to follow them at a leisurely pace. The further they went, the further Butch fell behind. When we finally reached the finish line (I was not even out of breath), Butch was in last place, three lengths back.
As Butch slowly rolled across the red line there was only I, in the shadows, to greet him.
Unseen, I watched as he wedged his large body from the cart, then roughly yanked the battered old football helmet from his sweating head. In disgust and disbelief, he looked about the empty street. With violence, he cursed and threw the helmet into the cart, and then began to trudge back uphill.
There were few people about now, so I had to be careful, hanging back. In fact, I almost left, but some imp of intuition luckily urged me on.
About halfway uphill a fat man was packing his kerosene burner and unsold buns and burgers. He glanced at Butch as he passed, chortling to himself as he did so.
"First again, eh, speedy?"
Without hesitation, Butch went for the man. Before the rotund joker had time to utter a single syllable more, Butch had hammered the fool's jolly round face, leaving tubby rolling in the dirt. As the helpless man cried out for mercy, hopelessly trying to regain his feet, Butch moved in, silencing him with a few strong kicks. When Butch walked away, the man was left a quivering mass of weeping blubber.
Fascinated, from the shadows, I watched.
For three days I turned the elements and their relationships over in my revolving mind. As a whole, the situation resembled some aberrant form of a self-mate problem in chess. That the key that would unlock the door of Butch's downfall was the abominable go-cart races was apparent. Rather, the difficulty lay in the location of that magic portal; the subtle insertion of that key; the gentle opening of that passage - and the shockingly unexpected, inexorable plunge into disaster.
All this, Art demanded of me, and to it my powers I bent.
"Well, my friend," I cheerily asked one night, "how go the corpses?"
Butch chuckled in his crudely sly way. "Still plenty dead, doc!"
"And that ass, Dr. Endecott?" I confidentially enquired.
At the mention of his odious supervisor, Butch's dark face clouded over. My side-project of cultivating Endecott into a bad rash on Butch was evidently yielding bitter fruit. Indeed, Endecott needled Butch nightly, hoping to make him quit. The good doctor was straining at the leash to fire the poor boy, being only restrained by my indulgent hand.
"Like to kill'im!" Butch growled.
Our words produced a faint, dead-echo against the stone-cold walls of the morgue. Truly, the basement dead-rooms were always a lonely, shadowy place, but it was only on third shift, and then only in the depths of the night, that the desolate isolation, the active, dripping horror of the place, found its fullest affect. Thus, with only remains and remains of remains as witness to my artistry, I continued.
"What work have we tonight?" I asked, vaguely gesturing toward the clear plastic boxes, red contents cloudily visible, scattered about the room.
"Lotza bits and pieces," Butch shrugged. " A few for the freezer. Most to grind and burn." He seemed to grin a bit at this last thought, evidently deriving some satisfaction from the disposal of diseased organs and limbs. I smiled in return, knowing a committed man is a happy man.
Casually, from the small, steel desk before me, I picked up the evening's work order. "Cancer's everywhere," I remarked. I noted the tattered copy of the local news and a fresh edition of a low-class le decouvert mag splayed on the desk. Textbook (if the textbook were penned by me).
I blithely tossed the bit of bureaucratic toilet paper back upon the desk (perfectly propelling it so that the blank, dead figures blanketed the voluptuous), and asked, "So how go the races, Butch?"
At this, his coarse features blackened, the spark of animation inflamed.
"Shit!" he said with violent disgust. "Lost again!" The mere memory of his latest disgrace caused everything from his hairy hands to his poorly shaven jaw to fiercely clench.
"Really?!" I said, affecting a beautifully feigned surprise. As if in stunned disbelief, I sank down onto the edge of the desk (actually getting quite comfy) "What happened?"
The poor beast was more than willing to unload his burden of woe upon an open ear. And so, in great detail, Butch began to relate the twists and turns of last weekend's debacle. In his own perverse way, I found his narrative keenly accurate. In fact, even his numerous digressions, which to the superficial eye seemed all but unconnected to the main thread, would, finally, be worked back into the weave. It all made sense. And all was grist for my mill.
The dolt was a veritable pitcher of sorrow as he poured out his heart-rending tale. Voluble, agitated, he paced about the small room, arms flailing, face contorted, even occasionally kicking one of the plastic containers wherein unknown organs and cold blood sloppily sloshed. Interestingly, the assault and battery incident received but a passing line ("Some fat ass ranked me, and I pounded him good. Then .). Overall, however, it was a capital performance, and I enjoyed myself immensely.
His pathetic vignette concluded, he stood before me, his thick arms imploringly throw out to his sides, the very picture of idiocy.
Romanticist that I am, the thought immediately crossed my mind that if we lived in a better, more elegant world, here I would let go an Olympian belly laugh and then toss the wretch into the meat grinder. But we do not. Human art, unlike that of the Creator, is not composed of sure, bold strokes, but rather of finely placed, hopeful ones.
"You're the expert," I said, giving the man his, totally undeserved, due. "However, it seems to me, via your lucid descriptions, that your go-cart needs to be more like this." And here I pointed to one of the steel carts used to transport parts and organs from the emergency and operating rooms to the morgue, and thence to the grinder, and finally to the fire ~ which purifies all things.
These carts were made of a high-grade steel and thus were practically indestructible. Battered and dented though they might be, year after year, on they rolled, faithfully carrying out their gruesome work. Some were said to be a half a century old. Naturally, legends had grown up around them.
The basic myth was that the special steel actually had nothing to do with the longevity - rather it was the constant bathing in human blood that preserved them. Of course, this gift of vivacious old age came with a price - namely, that they were a curse to all who came into contact with them. Disastrous bad luck, insanity, and so on, were the potential risk for anyone who was foolish enough to handle the "dead carts". Some of the orderlies tacitly refused to used them, carrying the plastic boxes by hand.
For example, the cart I had just pointed to, good old number 55, was connected to the tragic tale of Mary St. James. It was back in the '30s, so the story goes, and she was a young and feisty, newly hired nurse's aid. Sweet sixteen and a virgin, she had the poor sense to become giddy over one Rick Lutwidge, some ten years her senior and "nightshift morgue keeper" (as they quaintly termed the job in those days). It was on a sultry summer night, near upon the witching hour, when the fair lassie was persuaded (some say forced) to yield up her tender charms to panting Rick. Pity 'twas, no doubt in the sweat of the moment, that it was not the cold, concrete floor, nor even the grimy office desk, that served as the pedestal upon which Mary's flower was sacrificed, but rather handy number 55.
Something, however, went badly awry, and the poor girl, still spread eagle on the cart, bled to death. Rick, or Big Dick, as the local skalds have affectionately dubbed the impetuous fellow, perhaps fearing that the authorities would not comprehend the depths of his passion, decided to make a clean sweep of the matter. Mary, still warm, was hastily dismembered, ground to a mealy mush, and poured into the incinerator.
Alas, last minute plans are naught but the fathers of telltale signs! A bit of the doomed child's shoelace, originally white now bejeweled and bedecked with dried crimson drops of crime, hung unseen, like a secret signpost or a private trophy, at the bottom of the cart. Forsooth, a ticket to Hell.
With admirable efficiency, Big Dick was arrested, convicted, and electrocuted for the rape and murder of Mary St. James. And number 55, the vehicle of their passion, so to speak, picked up the name Bloody Mary.
To return, as soon as I had proposed Bloody Mary, at least in model, as a possible solution to Butch's dilemma, his perplexed features twisted into a skeptical frown.
He turned, shaking his thick head in disbelief at the plasma reeking, and leaking, thing. "But how.?" he began, spreading his broad, calloused palms in wonder. He looked the venerable war-horse up and down, and then stabbed a rude finger toward her much abused middle shelf. "A man can't fit in there!" he exclaimed. "Too damn tight!"
The intractable moron had again taken me literally, and again I teetered precariously on the brink of hysterical laughter. Butch, as all who suffer from that most insufferable of stupidities, the "practical mind", could think no further than his paw could reach. For such beings, an idea in the abstract is not merely inconceivable, it does not exist at all.
I was on the verge of informing the buffoon that I had meant he might model his cart along Bloody Mary's light, rugged lines, when an imp of fancy pulled my tongue.
All at once, like some rare, exotic, highly poisonous flower shown blossoming in seconds on high-speed film, the jaws of my imagination spread wide, revealing to my awed mind the net, in all its horrific and tragic detail, wherein I would ensnare my victim.
"Yes, that squeeze is what caused your predecessor such a shocking end," I judiciously remarked. "However, if you blowtorch out the middle." Here I shrugged and gave a knowing wink. "And look," I gave the old gal a gentle nudge with tip of my shoe and she dutifully gilded across the dark room. "Still smooth as a nightmare!"
May I never forget the look of gaping marvel, the stunned expression of sudden possibility, which leapt, like the very flames of Hell, into Butch's widening eyes.
Two weeks later Butch's knuckled paw was raised in victory at the ham-n-egger finish line. The boy was ecstatic; like a young Rottweiler with the taste of first-blood in his drooling mouth, he was all but peeing himself with joy. Naturally, he was quite ready to rush headlong into the second, nay, first, string races. I, however, recognized this sad delusion for what it was: the sleek machines in those upper groups would show up Bloody Mary for the slapped together slut that she was.
No, I could not permit my witless protégé a setback just as he began his descent to self-destruction. I intended, with consummate skill, to oil the twin demons of Pride and Ambitions until, of his own violation, he threw himself into the Pit of Doom.
Technical assistance being required, I purchased a book (naturally, out-of-town and incognito, as not only security but my own sense of decency dictated). Although the author's name was hardly a recommendation ("Will Wheelock"), his little tome proved an instructive guide to this regressive waste-time.
Butch's own modifications to Bloody Mary were as horrendous as they were simple: using a borrowed blowtorch and his own hacksaw, the center self had been excised; ply board panels were then nailed around all four sides, one being fitted with crude hinges so as to fashion a door, and in the front a raged hole had been hacked for a window. The steering wheel consisted of a twisted old piece of iron welded to the axel of the front wheels.
Admittedly, the made-over Bloody Mary did not much approximate the ideal of her type, the standard version of the go-cart contraption being something akin to a rolling coffin, whereas our little missy was more like a gutted refrigerator cut in two and fitted out with wheels.
It was the distinctive odor of putrid blood and flesh that remained ever the same, however.
I needed, now, in a single, deft stroke, to increase Bloody Mary's speed and further entangle Butch. But how was this to be done?
By this late stage, Butch's entire go-cart "workshop" had been transferred to an unused backroom in the morgue. His hospital duties had been reduced to a couple of hours of grinding and burning per night (which the hardy fellow, god bless him, found more of a tonic than a chore), with the rest of the night devoted to his useless tinkering with Bloody Mary.
All of this, of course, enraged the martinet Endecott, but the fool was impotent in the face of my command. I bluntly informed him that we were helping the community by employing this sub-normal individual, and to leave the poor boy alone. The quack was smoldering in his seat when I walked out of his tiny office.
"The steering mechanism you have concocted," I said, peering into the old gal's dark, stinking innards, "is a masterpiece of ingenuity!" Standing by, wrench in paw, the ape beamed at the tones of my pseudo-praise.
"But wouldn't something a bit lighter," I said with a cocked eyebrow, "be a bit more to the point?"
"Freakin' straight, doc!" the oaf blurted out. "But what?" He gave me a hopeless look.
"Well," said the spider to the fly, "we need something light, yet strong and durable."
His face resolved into a blank question mark as I led him into the side-room where the unclaimed corpses were stored.
I pointed through the bleak, fluorescent light to a table whereon one o the city's unfortunates lay, recently bagged.
"There is your answer," I said calmly.
The steering mechanism and axels were replaced with bones from available corpses. All moving parts were oiled with blood.
Bloody Mary took so well to this infusion of dead parts that it came as no surprise to me when Butch took first place in the B-group. With this victory, Butch's pride inflated to the point of thinking he could beat he Devil himself. It was time to strike.
I was, however, treading a very fine line, and time was growing terribly short. Butch, immersed in a monstrous hubris, insisted on racing Bloody Mary that weekend in the A-group. For my part, I knew that to delay any longer would dull the edge of my attack, to blunt the building magical tingle in my spine. Further, the toad Endecott was beginning to grow suspicious. No, this thing had to be finished.
But, if all was not to fail, this final move had to be played in the subtlest manner.
"If you want to win the big race, Butch," I proclaimed Friday night, "you'll have to ride with a fresh corpse!"
My "explanation", which any sane mind would have recognized as several miles into Psycho-ville, involved such abtrusiosities "settling body fluids", "bio-electrical magnetism", and "feng-shui accordance". These chimeras aside, the main thrust of my argument was scalpel sharp: stuff a fresh corpse into Bloody Mary with you and you'll roll down the damn hill a whole lot faster.
Take a 4x4 box, rig it out with wheels, paint it with blood, decorate the interior liberally with gory bones and rotting organs, and toss in a fresh corpse, to boot. Now, on a sweltering summer night, lock yourself in this rolling nightmare and race it downhill at an insane speed against go-carting fanatics.
Yes, you have the picture.
Well, hardly a joyride - but still, to Butch, a small price to pay to become Clapbury's go-cart champ.
"Will I really win, doc?" he breathlessly asked.
"You would have won," I said, giving him a pained look. His eyes narrowed.
I reiterated the problem: the corpse had not only to be fresh, but also of certain exact measurements (due to fluid freshness, air pressure, and so on). And the race was tomorrow night.
"So you see, my good friend," I said, with a defeated look, "it appears you will lose."
This was something of a shock to the poor boob; it were as if I had jabbed him with an electric cattle-prod.
"How come?" he violently spit out.
"Butch, what are the chances," I said sadly, "that such a made-to-order corpse will roll through our doors tonight?"
I shook my benign head in helpless resignation and despair, gave his thick shoulder a pat of moral support, and exited the silent morgue. The stars in the night sky were like tiny skulls pinned to a backdrop of black velvet.
Again, appropriately attired, I moved unnoticed through the evening race crowd. The night's sticky heat was exacerbated by the decided increase in spectators; the throng overflowed from the sidelines onto the track, and the start and finish were hubs of bustling, chaotic activity. Indeed, Butch and Bloody Mary were rising stars.
And about to supernova, I hoped.
Of course, to what degree the diverse elements of my denouement would actualize, I had no way of knowing. As it transpired, it was unpredictable Life herself who added the final needle to my crown of thorns.
Here I must admit, a bit shamefaced, that my simple ending consisted of nothing more than the police arresting Butch at the finish-line - and if he had just won! - for necrophilia, cannibalism, and what not. And if for murder, so much the better.
How so? Quite simple: irregularities had been noted. Missing parts, missing bodies, for example. Officer, we keep tight track of these things, you know. I had phoned our night supervisor, Dr. Endecott. What? This fellow Mincer? Very well, call the police.
The madman Butch being haled away to an institution for the criminally insane, or, better yet, to the executioner's gurney (ah, humanity!), was a satisfying, if slightly prosaic conclusion.
Much better things, however, lay in wait.
Although Butch arrived early he was till delayed in getting to the starting line by a tangle of jabbering and yelping children all desirous of an autograph or photo. Local celebrity seemed oddly to suit him, and he basked in it ~ although he was soon to roast.
Indeed, even I, as I think back to that fateful, magic moment, find myself victim to a maudlin mood. There our intrepid, clueless hero stood, posing for snapshot after snapshot, this grinning little blond beast beside him, or that freckle faced lad on his arm - and all the while the Fates, the white-tipped flames, and humble I, burned with impatience.
Where are those photographs now? What a magnet for morbid curiosity!
At last, Butch and Bloody Mary, amidst cheers, reached the white-line, the beginning of their end. As the spectators backed, or were pushed, away, I directed the full force of my observational powers upon the transparent enigma of Butch. Both he and his gal, however, were poker-faced. On a more darkly hopeful note, I did note, however, Butch's sly opening of Bloody Mary's door, and his coyly cautious entrance therein.
The atmosphere was rippling, electric. I had the distinct impression that anything was possible. Indeed, the black velveteen skin of the night, twinkling Argus-eyed, seemed scarcely able to contain her pulsing, coursing blood.
Every player, every piece, was set, prepared (aching!) for dynamic interaction. The Juggernaut of Fate, straining, creaking, under the burden of millennium, awaited the final spark of inevitability. As always, Fate yearned to roll on, on, ever on, bringing her gifts of disaster, doom, and death.
The starter's gun screamed, and off they shot.
The entire mob, abroil with shouting, tripping, and shoving, surged forward after the speeding carts. Any pretense of order and civility was now tossed pell-mell to the careless wind. "Who's winning?", this, and nothing else, was what mattered. Neighbor slammed aside neighbor; brothers battled, jostling for better position; entire families were torn asunder by the fierce, downward rush, with fallen children, all but trampled, left behind, wailing in the dust.
Mass hysteria. A modern Black Plague of the soul drove them on. I ran with them, within them, concealed by them ~ ever and always the watchful Eye.
Indeed, for an instant (that was an infinity), I was transcendent: the All-Seeing Orb, that is itself transparent.
But the twin handmaidens of Time and Fate lead us all on, and soon my epiphany was left behind and I found myself pressing forward with the chaotic mass - though straining to see what they knew naught of.
The initial, straight section of the track had been covered with a dizzying, blinding speed. As the five carts entered the second, trap-infested area, the crowd's pathology was redoubled, and a fresh burst of hoots and howls erupted. All the carts were violently rocked and rattled as they sped through Pot-hole Heaven, but Bloody Mary even more so. Once or twice it even appeared that the old gal would tip over completely, just crashing flat-out on her side. But, as sure and quick as death, on she flew.
No doubt having great difficulty with the steering, poor Butch must have been flailing about energetically within the confined space of Bloody Mary. Thus it was that her door suddenly sprung open. And an arm, messily hacked off at the shoulder, tumbled out onto the road.
I, along with several hundred other spectators, blinked and gasped, but the heedless racers, with Butch gaining speed, dashed on. Near the edge of the road the disembodied arm had stopped rolling; it still rocked back and forth, however, as if trying to wave bye-bye.
But I had no time to ponder this significant, if casually tossed, fact. Down track, a tremendous, grinding crack rang out. Bloody Mary had veered wildly out of her lane, crashing into another flying go-cart. The "8 Ball" careened off the road, swiping through spectators, finally plowing with terrific force into a sturdy, old tree. The remaining four sped insanely on.
I took to my heels in hot pursuit of the inevitable. It was rough going; the crowd had whipped itself into a bloody frenzy and lashed about with random precision. Like a priest of Dionysus, however, my false beard and costume whipping about me, I wended my holy way through the madly worshipping Bacchants, jumping, shoving, and pushing as need be.
Bloody Mary's door had been ripped off during the crash and thus I was afforded a glimpse of Butch's wild exertions. Struggling to steer, he was covered in gore as some dark bulk pressed in on him from behind.
With joyful horror my heart leapt as I saw that Butch grasped the wheel with both hands ~ and an extra leg beside him.
And then the leg flew out the door.
As he tried to catch it, a head, like a poorly inflated basketball, bounced out onto the road.
Hellooo Johnny!
Convulsively, with Bloody Mary's wheels screeching and sparking beneath him, Butch tried to reach back and catch the runaway head. Fumble.
Instantly, his eyes flashed back to the road, but that lapse was fatal. He was completely off-course now and speeding toward the edge of the road.
Exactly toward me.
In that last frantic, freewheeling moment, did Butch catch any glimpse of the face beneath the mask? Unlikely. Life, unrelenting, unforgiving, presses ever onward toward her golden goal of individual destruction ~ with but the shreds and crumbs left to annotators. And wonder, pure wonder, left to the artist.
I dashed aside, and, in techni-color speed, Bloody Mary blurred past, cutting viciously through the screaming, falling crowd. Styro-foam beer containers were blasted through, erupting into an explosion of cans and ice. The slow-of-foot were tagged, clipped, or knocked down and run over outright.
My aura of awe, my spell of hushed hilarity, was pushed to the tremulous brink of bliss as a tremendously fat man, roll upon roll of familiar blubber once again abounce in fear and rage, barreled toward me. No sooner had I sidestepped, letting he pathetic fool rush past me, than Bloody Mary crashed dead-on into fatso's abandoned gasoline grill.
The effect was as instantaneous as it was excruciatingly beautiful. A blue burst of liquid fire, as if spit forth from a flame-thrower, engulfed Bloody Mary.
Radically, the she angled to the left - and then, with bone-splintering force, slammed into a massive oak tree.
Her four flaming sides fell away with the wicked impact. For a brief, staggering moment, the hellish flames concealed the horror now lay open.
And then, in full nightmare version, Butch stood from the wreck: the burning jack-in-the-box popped up from Hell.
Completely wrapped in flame and smoke, oddly still gripping some piece or other of corpse in on hand and a fragment of Bloody Mary in the other, he stepped out from the burning heap on the run. He moved as if he fought some unseen demon, spinning, tripping, burning like a torch, fuming with the stench of charred flesh.
Unable to stop himself, like a victim of the magnet of Hell, he moved, spinning, tripping, burning like a torch, toward the chain-link fence. Continuously, irresistibly, he moved toward the Graveyard, a trail of smoke and fiery ash swirling about him.
The crowd, which had fallen into a dumb, horrified silence since the crash, now began to stir. Their disordered grumbling rose, seeking a rallying point. Slowly, the circle closed about the burning man.
From the darkness a voice shrieked.
"Graveyard him!!!"
En masse, the mob rushed forward laying brutal hands upon the seared, dazed, and dying man. Disregarding injury, the men seized the charred, burning body, lifting it high above their heads. The women and children, screeching and cursing, pulled furiously at the chain-link fence.
In one awful heave, with the velvety star-studded sky for backdrop, Butch's smoking, twitching remains were tossed over the fence. Below, from the impenetrable blackness, came a thud, and then a final, strangled scream.
And then silence descended upon us all.
Slowly, without a word, the crowd began to disperse.
And I, too, my work done, faded into the darkness.
Send your comments on this story to the author:
