SEVEN
There really wasn’t anything like being chauffeured around town in the backseat of a police car. The smell of warm leather, the stink of crime and stale coffee. The hard, uncomfortable seats and the geometric pattern of safety mesh painted onto the back of the driver’s head. No, there wasn’t anything like it. It was fresh, it was exhilarating—it was absolutely horrifying, and Exitus hadn’t even been apprehended!
He got to wondering, sitting there in the hoodlums’ section of the police car, about one of his high school buddies.
Niles Bleu had been even more disturbing than the beautiful Agatha Freeland, she of the love affair with Pinhead. He was infamous for his rather macabre antics, which ranged everywhere from realistic eyeballs in the urinals to an actual dead rat in the English teacher’s thermos (Ms. Matthews never did come back after that, the rumor being that she’d suffered a nervous breakdown in the staff room of such magnitude that even a lobotomy couldn’t calm her down).
Surprisingly, Niles had been Exitus’s closest friend, and while Exitus couldn’t even handle a look at Spaghetti Os without feeling violently ill, he’d relished the joy on Niles’s face whenever he’d caused some fright-related heart attacks.
That oddly placed pride might have stemmed from the fact that he and Niles were such opposites; a goth boy afraid of butterflies (which strangely drew an awful lot of followers, as if Exitus had been Jesus or something—a fact not lost to the unhinged maniacs firebombing the local outreach center for victims of rape, incest, fear and teenage stupidity) and the tiny lad whose Bible seemed to be Turn of the Screw. Niles Nathaniel Bleu was the complete antithesis to Exitus (a kid who resembled a wee vole and was only popular because his first name just so happened to lack a second D) and for that Niles had been like a celestial being.
A celestial being who brought a corpse to Senior Prom.
Now, he wasn’t an actual corpse (the smell would have been too foul), but some random guy off of the street who’d willingly accepted the role. It would have been shocking enough if Niles had simply come with a man (Niles was all for the ladies, mind, one-hundred percent; he’d only wanted to press a few buttons), but he had never been one to let sleeping dogs lie. If he saw a stick setting on the ground beside a dosing lion, the man wouldn’t have been able to walk by. Niles would be the dope on the front page of the newspaper (above the fold) who’d gotten mauled to death after he’d repeatedly poked the lion in the eye with the stick. So, a corpse to Prom it was. He and the willing participant….
Oh, Hell. It was Exitus.
Agatha Freeland had denied Exitus the fortune of going to Prom with him and so, seething and cursing the world and all of its female inhabitants, he had agreed to Niles’s dastardly plot. Of course, he’d gotten a little bit drunk first—it was kind of hard playing the part of the walking dead whilst sober—and then he didn’t get just “a little bit” drunk either. Exitus had gotten so drunk that when, on the TV, a man appeared with a skull tattooed on his left hand Exitus had said, “man, I gotta get me one-ah-ose”. Niles had agreed. So Exitus and his best friend had walked down to the local tattoo parlor (in the basement of a friend of a friend of a friend’s nephew’s girlfriend’s uncle’s friend) and gotten himself tattooed. On the inner lip. While that friend of a friend of a friend’s nephew’s girlfriend’s uncle’s friend had smoked a joint and coughed a few times into Exitus’s mouth and snorted and spat and asked how one does exactly spell “this here word ‘cause it looks all wrong, man”. By the time it was all over and done with, Exitus not only had the word “TOAD” tattooed on his rapidly swelling lip, but he’d also somehow gotten high while Niles came out of the place with virgin skin and no foreign substance in his mouth other than some pills found rolling around the bottom of a toolbox drawer.
He’d said, “Dude!” after swallowing those half dozen pills. “We gotta fuck you up real good now!”
But in the end Exitus had made a damn fine corpse. The make-up and costume were superb specimens which could have been stolen from the archives of The Night of the Living Dead and he hadn’t even needed to memorize any dialogue (which was a blessing, for his lip looked like something found in a cabinet of curiosities under the heading “Disease and Other Malformations”). At least the expression on everyone’s faces were to die for—until the point where the police showed up, and then everyone was laughing hysterically.
The principal had suspected Niles of using any number of things for quite some time, but never actually had the proof to come right out and make an accusation. What luck, when Exitus the Corpse and Niles the Vile showed up in the gymnasium drunk and high and hopped up on barbiturates! The cops were summoned midway through the first quarter of the night (before the halftime show of the Prom Queen/King elections, but not after spotting Agatha and berating her with speech slurred from drink, slowed from weed and squashed from a massively swollen lip).
That car ride, also in the backseat with a police escort, had been not so much terrifying as unnerving.
Always prone to such unpleasant upheavals, Exitus had vomited onto the floor. He’d felt much better after that, though his lip stung something awful. With his head hanging down toward the floor, he noted the smell of the vehicle (like the Wronki one he’d find himself in five years later): that mandatory odor of warm leather, crime and stale coffee. And vomit. And the halitosis of Niles, who’d never once in how-many-years been seen brushing his teeth, who was sitting next to Exitus with a wide grin on his face. His eyes had been shining with, yes, the light of excitement but also with drugs and drink. When he spoke, it was in rapid time with his words crudely stitched together with fishing line. Exitus couldn’t understand much of what his best friend had been saying, but he caught the profanity and some sort of strange reference to foam puppets.
Exitus never did see Niles after that night. Occasionally he’d gotten letters, written in a tight and spidery hand which always asked for money or for promising news that someone else back home had also crawled down into a black festering pit of existence, and then the letters stopped.
The obituary never did show up in the newspaper or as a small throw away spot on the news, but Exitus always liked to hope that Niles Nathaniel Bleu had passed away quietly in a mosquito net-covered cot somewhere in the underbelly of Africa after finding God and devoting his life to bring meaning to the lives of AIDS orphans. Unlikely as world peace, but there was room enough to wish.
Sighing, Exitus brought himself back to the present, to the police car and the garrulous officer in the driver’s seat who was taking his passenger into town.
“You never did tell me,” the officer began. His name was Welsh, or some other nationality on the continent of Asia. “Why pick such a strange name to answer to?”
There was a loose piece of stitching on the seat. Exitus picked up the thread and started to finger it. “Not as strange as Pilot Inspektor.”
“Still,” Welsh pressed, turning left by the skeleton of an old tractor. “Why would you want to be called something like that, have people think of you as a lunatic?”
Exitus hoped to God he was no longer anything like that idiot kid he used to be, running around dressed as a corpse with a gnarly lip, because—Christ.
“But it just might be a lunatic they’re looking for,” Exitus suggested.
Welsh—a grown man, a police officer—tittered.
In spite of his fear of the situation he was in, Exitus rolled his eyes. Laka, his beloved plastic hula girl, surely would have done the same. She even would have added a sardonic quip, but Exitus had no talent for such things. He could play a mean pair of spoons, but humor was lost to him.
“Who was that?” Officer Welsh asked. “Paul Simon, was it?”
“Billy Joel, actually.”
“No, I’m pretty sure it was Paul Simon. Billy Joel did ‘Kodachrome’. You know—” and Lord please help him, he began to croon “—‘Kodachrome, they give us the night’s bright colors. They give us the greens of summers, makes you think it’s a sunny day—oh yeah.’ That was Billy Joel.”
“Billy Joel’s the freaky-looking face on the Piano Man album. Paul Simon’s the one who had the tiff with Art Garfunkel, and those lyrics are a wee bit incorrect….”
Welsh frowned into the rear view mirror. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-three, sir.”
“Exactly. I’ve got twenty years on you. I think I know what I’m talking about.”
Exitus put up his hands in surrender.
Welsh must not have liked silence, for he started right up again with a new subject. “What brings you to these parts?”
In case the car was bugged, in case the truth might indeed set him free, Exitus spoke without lies. “I’m passing through on my way to the Mustard Museum up north.”
“That’s a fun place. Took my wife there on our first date. The trolls scared her so bad she almost didn’t want a second date.” Welsh winked into the rear view mirror. “But she couldn’t resist my charms.”
“No? Well…. Yeah, I’m on my way there.”
“You like those queer roadside attractions, huh?”
“Very much so. It keeps life interesting.”
Welsh stopped at an intersection. Turned right on the red light more quickly than Exitus had the other day; the road had been deserted, so he’d taken a glance at his map and soon found himself nearly pummeled by a very angry woman in a Beetle who was late for her tanning appointment.
“Any good ones, or are they all like the World’s Largest Ball of Twine?”
This was a very long car ride. No wonder the diner never got any business, it was way out in the middle of nowhere!
“No, they’re all different. Only a week ago I went to The Rock. It’s suppose to look like the head of Beethoven, but it more closely resembles a platypus. The guides say it dropped out of the sky one day, but if you look closely enough you can just make out the ruts where the thing was rolled into place. It’s neat, though. They even sell shirts. ‘I’ve been to The Rock!’”
“That was a great movie.”
Exitus had fiddled with the seat stitching so long that he had pulled it out of the seat. He spun it around between his thumb and index finger. “Sir?”
“The Rock. It’s a great movie. Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage, they break into the San Fransisco penitentiary in order to stop a madman from raining a deadly virus on the city.”
“Bombing it, you mean?”
“Bombing?” Welsh laughed. “No, it was a virus. They bad guy, see, wanted to destroy San Fransisco and so he created a plague-like virus to wipe it away.”
No wonder they weren’t getting anywhere; Officer Welsh was senile in his forties and had forgotten where exactly the town of Wronki was located. They were driving around in ever widening circles talking about pop singers swapping songs and a movie with the wrong plot line.
“Nitroglycerin. The bad guy wants to destroy San Fransisco by blowing it to smithereens and puts Nitroglycerin into a dozen or so highly unstable glass containers the size of billiard balls, which are then strung together like pearls.”
Outside of the police car, the town of Wronki sprang up into an unassuming portrait of quaint little buildings with quaint little people strolling about the quaint little streets.
“That was the virus.”
If this were happening five years ago, with Niles Bleu in the backseat and not Exitus, Officer Welsh might have received an impromptu education in pop culture. But Exitus was not Niles (junkie Niles, dead junkie Niles, reformed junkie Niles, or dead reformed junkie Niles (pick a fate)) and so he lapsed into a kind of annoyed stupor. Annoyed because of the idiot driving him into the center of a town too small to be placed on a map and too far away from the diner to justify the diner’s existence, and annoyed because his hearse had been taken away from him to be searched for evidence of a crime he hadn’t committed and he was fairly certain that people couldn’t just do that, take away people’s vehicles and homes just because they were the sole witness to a crime.
Officer Welsh began to whistle, as if knowing that Exitus was dangling on frayed nerves and whistling the tune of “Kodachrome” (badly, worse than when he sang the song) would finally make the boy scream and confess to the murder of Adam the Cook, killed by his prized golden cow.
Why use the cow as a bludgeon, anyway?
Why ever get a golden cow in the first place?
Hours before Adam had met his maker, as Exitus sat in the diner taking soda water to the sweet-smelling ketchup spot on his only jacket, the cook had recounted the history of that evil cow.
The evil cow named Harold had once been bundled in loud pink wrapping paper and placed inside of a box. That box had been wrapped in equally garish orange wrapping paper and placed inside of another box, and so on with different screaming colors for another ten boxes. That large package was placed in front of Adam’s bedroom door eleven months ago, on the morning of his 28th birthday. Poor guy thought he was getting a jet ski, but instead….
“Yeah, there was Harold. After all that time unwrapping box after box, I get a cow. It was a gag gift, really. I was kinda heavy as a kid, everyone called me ‘Heifer’. Like the cartoon character, you know?”
Aunt Lily was not one for cartoons (there was far too much violence for her taste). It had been a downright miracle she’s allowed Exitus’s precious Fraggles into the house, and so a show about a wallaby, his dog, some angry frog neighbors, and his best friend Heifer were all but forbidden in the house. So Exitus watched the show in Uncle Monty’s shed, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember the name of the show. Something’s Something Life, was it?
“It kinda sucked, actually, seeing a sodding cow at the bottom of all those freaking boxes. I was pissed.”
Pissed, he’d lifted the cow out of the box. As he did so, his fingers dislodged something taped to its underbelly and a single ticket fell away from Harold and back into the box.
“But that’s not the thing. The thing is that the ticket was to a taping of Rocco DiSpirito’s show. Rocco-motherfucking-DiSpirito, man! Only my culinary hero, only the greatest chef alive, only—”
Rocco’s Modern Life. That was the show Exitus had watched in secret in Uncle Monty’s shed. That was the show with the cow named Heifer and the wallaby named Rocco, which of course segwayed into the show ticket. Adam took the cow with him to the show. With that cow he had attracted the attention of his culinary hero and got Rocco DiSpirito’s autograph, only to be killed by that signed golden cow a month before his 29th birthday.
“Tough Break, Kid.”
