Surfing the Gnarl Read online

  “Listen to this,” said Danny, pulling a folded up newspaper from his hip pocket. He hawked some spit on to the ground, then read, more mellifluously than one might have expected. Danny had gone to C. T. Piggott High School the same as Jack and Tonel; he’d been a senior when they’d been freshmen. But he’d been expelled before his graduation.

  “Falwell County’s most notorious computer criminal is temporarily lodged in the Casa Linda Motel on Highway 501 southeast of Killeville, next to a tattoo parlor and a liquor store that rents adult videos,” read Danny. “His neighbors include a few parolees and at least one registered sex offender. His second-floor room in the thirty-four-unit motel overlooks the parking lot of a strip club.”

  “Punkin-head Chesney,” said Tonel. “We just seen him. He and Gretchen goin’ to church.”

  “Gretchen?” parroted Danny, as if unwilling or unable to understand. He was intent on his presentation. “Do you dogs grasp why I read you the news item?”

  “Because you’re spun,” said Jack, laughing.

  ”Give me a piece of that gum.”

  “Three dollars,” said Danny, reaching into shirt pocket. “Casa Linda is my crib. The county thinks they can just dump any old trash on my doorstep. I been planning to write a letter to the paper. But—”

  “Who’s the sex offender, Dank-man?” interrupted Tonel.

  Danny looked embarrassed and chewed his gum in silence. The sex offender living at the Casa Linda was Danny. He’d been expelled from Piggott High for putting a Web cam into the girls’ locker room. One of the girls who’d been showering there was frosh Lucy Candler, the pluperfect cheer daughter of Judge Bowen Candler and his wife Burke. The Judge had thrown the book at Danny. Racketeering and child pornography. Even though, Danny being Danny, the Web site hadn’t worked.

  “Here’s three bucks,” said Jack, pulling the singles out of his wallet. “This is my last night in town, Danny. Disable me, dog.”

  “I’m on the boat,” said Tonel, getting out his own wallet.

  “I’m up for a power run,” said Danny, taking the money and fishing out two sticks of gum. “But Les Trucklee says I gotta be here at dawn for the barbeque. All I do in that kitchen is, like, fry frozen fries for freezing. I can’t hack no more of that today. Tomorrow will be here soon enough. You dogs got any booze?”

  “We know where there’s a lot of bourbon,” said Jack, impishly curious to see what might happen if he encouraged Danny. “Right, Tonel?” Ragland had fiercely enjoined the caddies to keep mum about the mibracc’s lockers, but tonight of all nights, Jack could afford to be reckless. “You get Ragland to chasing you, Tonel,” continued Jack. “And I’ll scoop into Mr. Cuthbert’s stash.” Anything was better than going home.

  “What stash?” asked Danny.

  So he told Danny, and they talked it over a little more as the light faded, in no rush to actually do anything yet, the three of them chewing their Winnipeg Wheelchair. They strolled into the patch of rough between the first tee and the eighteenth green. There was a grassy dell in among the trees where they could stretch out without anyone coming along to boss them.

  “Danny!”

  It was the voice of Les Trucklee, the personnel manager. The boys could see him standing on the floodlit terrace next to the barbeque wagon. He wasn’t a bad guy—he’d hired Danny despite his record. Les Trucklee was gay, not too bright, in his thirties, a wannabe yuppie, with thinning blond hair in a comb-over. He had very large ears and a fruity voice.

  “Oh, Danny!” repeated Trucklee, peering out into the night. “I need you. I know you’re out there! I hear your voice. You’re making things hard, Danny.”

  Jack or Tonel could have made a lewd joke then, based on the obvious fact that Les had a crush on Danny, and on the rumored likelihood that the two were having an affair. But they knew better than to tease their older friend about so delicate a topic. Danny could turn mighty mean. And he carried a sizable pocket knife. Finally Trucklee went back inside.

  “Let’s get that bourbon,” said Danny, breaking the strained silence.

  Circling around behind the barbeque wagon, the three made their way toward the locker room door. It had a sliding dead bolt on the outside so nobody could get out, but it had a keyed lock as well. Danny undid the bolt, but the doorknob wouldn’t turn. And they hadn’t even seen Ragland and the mibracc go out.

  “I know another way in,” said Danny. “Through the ceiling of the furnace room. You can hop up through a hole I found.”

  “Go in the ceiling?” said Tonel.

  “There’s a crawlspace,” said Danny. “It goes to the ladies’ locker room. There’s a grate over their showers. The men’s is the same.”

  “You’re still peeping?” said Jack, a balloon of mirth rising in his chest. “You really are a sex offender, Danny. Keep it up, and the Man’s gonna cut out your balls and give you Neuticles. For the public good.”

  “Laugh it up, bagwort,” shot back Danny. “Meanwhile Albert Chesney’s off with your girl.”

  Climbing into the ceiling was a dumb idea, but, hey. It was the end of summer. So yeah, they snuck to the furnace room, got up into the ceiling, and made their way across the hanging supports. Danny kept making snorting noises like a wild pig, and then Tonel would say “Neuticles,” and then they’d laugh so hard they’d flop around like fish. They were riding the Wheelchair for fair.

  Eventually they found themselves above the ceiling vent in the shower room of the men’s lockers. There were voices coming up. Ragland and the mibracc. Still in here after all.

  Peeking through the grate, Jack saw Ragland in the shower with the old men, all of them naked. The men looked sluggish and tired. One of them—Mr. Gupta—had collapsed to the floor and looked oddly flat. Just now Ragland was pulling something like a cork out of Mr. Inkle’s navel. A flesh-colored bung. A stream of straw-colored fluid gushed out of the mibracc, splashing on the tile floor and running toward the drain.

  “Smeel,” whispered Danny.

  “You mean lymph,” murmured Jack.

  “No, dog, that’s smeel,” hissed Tonel. “The Dank-man knows.”

  They were trying to act like what they were seeing was funny—but they were realizing it wasn’t. It was awful. The air smelled of urine and alcohol, meat and feces. It would be very bad if Ragland found them watching. There was no more joking, no more chat. The boys peered through the grate in silence.

  Actually the smeel wasn’t all running down the drain. The smelly dregs were sliding away, but a clear, sparkling fraction of the smeel was gathering in pools and eddies near the drain, humping itself up into tiny waterspouts, circling around and around, the smaller vortices joining into bigger ones. A spinning ring of smeel slid across the tiles like a miniature hurricane. It headed right out of the shower stall and disappeared into the locker room.

  Meanwhile Mr. Inkle flopped over onto his side like a deflating balloon. Ragland pushed the skin around with his bare feet, then trod along its length, squeezing out the last gouts of smeel. He nudged the Inkle skin over next to the Gupta skin. After draining the three other mibracc— none of whom seemed to mind—he wrapped the five skins into tight rolls, and went out into the locker room. The clarified smeel gathered into five watery columns like miniature typhoons and followed him.

  The boys heard a rattling of locker doors. The mi-bracc skins waited, their edges twitching ever so slightly. Ragland reappeared, still naked. He fetched the skins one by one, clattering and splashing in the next room. Each time they saw Ragland, there was one less smeel tornado following him. Evidently he was stashing the mibracc and their smeel inside the golf bags.

  Next Ragland took a long, soapy shower. Then came the rustling of him getting dressed, followed by the unlocking and locking of the outer door. All was silent.

  Danny lifted loose the grate and the boys dropped down onto the tiled shower room floor. Jack happened to know that under his counter Ragland had a thing like a monster Swiss knife of plastic thumbs, one thumb
for each club member—in case someone died of old age, which happened often enough to matter. Jack fetched the master thumbs and opened up Mr. Cuthbert’s locker. They peered into the golf bag.

  Something twitched in the golden liquid, making a tiny splash. Yes. Mr. Cuthbert was in there, rolled up like a pickled squid. The preservative fluid was just level with the golf bag’s top edge.

  Danny leaned over and sucked up some of it.

  “Yaaar,” he said, wiping his lips. “Good.”

  The stuff seemed to hit him right away, and very hard. When he unsteadily ducked down to drink some more, his chin banged into the bag and, oh God, the bag fell over. Although the glass in the bag didn’t shatter, the liquid slopped across the floor.

  Mr. Cuthbert slid right out the bag, looking like a wet burrito. Tonel yanked the golf bag upright, but Mr. Cuthbert remained on the tiles.

  The spilled liquor and smeel puddled around the mibracc. Slowly the fluid began eddying again, bulging itself into a mound. The stuff had shed its excremental odors in the showers. The room filled with the heady fruitcake-and-eggnog perfume of bourbon. Crazy Danny found an empty glass and dipped it into the vortex.

  “Naw, naw,” said Tonel, still holding the golf bag. “Don’t be drinkin’ that mess!”

  “‘S good,” repeated Danny, gesturing with his glass. His pupils were crazed pinpoints. There was no reasoning with him. His Adam’s apple pumped up and down as he drank.

  Jack found a mop and nudged the weirdly animated smeel-bourbon into a bucket that he poured back into the golf bag. All the while the coiled skin of Mr. Cuthbert was slowly twisting around, making a peevish hissing noise.

  “Help me jam him back in and let’s get out of here,” Jack told Tonel.

  “You be touchin’ him,” said Tonel. “Not me.”

  Jack hunkered down and took hold of Mr. Cuthbert. The mibracc felt like incompletely cured food, like a half-dried apricot: leathery on the outside, wet and squishy in the middle. He was hissing louder than before. A little more smeel trickled from the bunghole in his belly-button.

  Gritting his teeth, Jack rerolled Mr. Cuthbert and slid him into his golf bag. The skin twitched and splashed. A drop of the bourbon-smeel landed on Jack’s lower lip. Reflexively he licked it off. Error. The room began ever so slowly to spin.

  While Jack paused, assessing the damages, crazy Danny reached past him to scoop out one last glassful of the poison bourbon. Mr. Cuthbert’s golf bag rocked and clattered; bubbles rose to the surface. The noises echoed back from the other mibracc. All five lockers were shaking.

  “Let’s bounce,” urged Tonel, over by the locker room door. He already had it open, he’d unlocked the doorknob lock. And they’d left the outside dead bolt open.

  “There you are, Danny,” came the voice of Les Trucklee as they stepped out onto the floodlit terrace. He was out there checking over the barbeque wagon and smoking a cigarette. “I hope I’m not seeing what I think I’m seeing in your hand.”

  Jack quickly closed the locker room door behind them. He didn’t bother fastening the manual bolt. Surely the mibracc couldn’t get out of their lockers unaided.

  “You ain’t seein’ squat,” Danny was saying, holding the glass behind his back. “I gotta leave now, Les, I just got a message from my boys here. It’s my mother. She’s real sick.”

  “Mother Dank ill again?” said Les in an indulgent, disbelieving tone. “She’s a susceptible old dear, isn’t she? Maybe she should wear more clothes. Are you in any condition to drive, Danny? If you’ll linger a bit, I could give you a lift.”

  “No, Les,” said Danny, his voice cold. A long moment passed. Dazzled moths were beating around the lights. Dizzy from his marijuana gum and the drop of mi-bracc fluid, Jack was seeing glowing trails in the air behind the insects. He thought he could hear hammering sounds from the locker room, but nobody else was noticing.

  “All right then,” said Les, stubbing out his butt. “I’m back to serving our patrons. The ladies are on their dessert drinks, flirting with each others’ husbands. They’re excited about the barbeque and golf tournament tomorrow. Don’t forget you’re onstage bright and early, Danny, we’ll want to start up the grill at the crack of dawn. You and your friends stay out of trouble tonight.” Les sighed and ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “I wish I was young again. I never had enough fun.”

  One of the moths landed on Jack’s hand. The feathery touch grated on his tautened nerves. As he brushed the moth away, he seemed to hear a faint cry, and when he glanced down he saw that the moth had a tiny head resembling that of a round-eyed woman with tangled blond hair. Jack’s stifled exclamation turned Les Trucklee’s attention to him.

  “Good luck at college, Jack. If one of you fellows happens to get a wild hair up your ass, stop by around one or two tonight and I’ll give you a free nightcap. Top shelf. Why don’t you sleep on my office couch again tonight, Danny, just to be getting up early. It’ll be even better than last time.”

  This was too much for Tonel, who let out a loud guffaw.

  And then they were in the parking lot, Danny sitting on his obese black Harley gunning it. His face was dark and angry. Les had gone too far, told too much. Danny roared the motorcycle even harder.

  Danny had gotten the hog used from a Killeville insurance salesman who’d bought it as a temporary stopgap against his midlife crisis before moving on to a girlfriend in Virginia Beach. The machine was loaded with puffy middle-aged accessories, including enormous hard-shelled saddlebags. Instead of tearing them off”—hell, he’d paid for them, hadn’t he?—Danny had gotten one of his buddies at Rash Decisions Tattoo to paint them with renditions of the Pig Chef—two smirking pigs in aprons and chef’s hats, one holding a meat cleaver and the other waving a long three-tined fork with sharpness-twinkles. The Pig Chef was—if you thought about it—one of the more sinister icons of American roadside art. Danny’s personal totem. What kind of pig is a butcher? What kind of pig cooks barbeque? A traitor pig, a killer pig, a doomed preterite pig destined for eternal damnation. Danny’s Pig Chefs showed the full weight of this knowledge in their mocking eyes and snaggled snouts.

  “I’m gonna go catch Stiffie’s act,” said Danny. Stiffie Ryder was his idol, his proof of masculinity, his favorite woman to peep at. Stiffie worked as a stripper at the Banana Split, a bar and grill located on the same stretch of Route 501 as the Casa Linda and Rash Decisions Tattoo, Killeville’s own little Sodom and Gomorrah, just outside the city limits.

  “What about those skins in the golf bags?” asked Jack. “What if they try and get out?” The drop he’d licked off his lip was still working on him. One of his legs felt shorter than the other. He put his hand on Tonel’s shoulder for support.

  “They can gangbang Les Trucklee,” said Danny. “They can warm him up for me.” He glared at Jack and Tonel, who had no thought of uttering a response. Danny brushed back his lank, greasy hair, drank off the last bit of bourbon-smeel, and tossed his glass to shatter in the parking lot. For the first time Jack noticed that the tips of Danny’s ears were pointed. “I can’t believe Les was talking that way in front of you two,” continued Danny. “Like he’s my sissy. He’s gonna pay the price.” And with that he roared off.

  ”Danny buggin’ out,” said Tonel. “Trucklee better watch hisself.”

  “I don’t know how Danny can drive,” said Jack. “I’m so—” He staggered to one side and puked.

  “Weak bitch,” said Tonel, not unkindly.

  Jack heaved again, bringing up the day’s four CocaColas and the burger and fries he’d had for lunch. Right away he felt better.

  The vomit was a little heap at the edge of the asphalt, faintly lit by the terrace lights. Was it hunching itself up like the smeel had done? Beginning ever so slightly to twist into an eddy?

  “Come on, dog,” said Tonel. “Let’s creep on home. You can pedal, can’t you?”

  “Yeah,” said Jack, looking away from the shifting mound on the pavement. “I’m better
now. I got a drop of that crap in my mouth. From the golf bags. I can’t believe how much of it Danny drank. We shouldn’t have let him ride.”

  “He’d a pulled his knife if we tried to stop him,” said Tonel.

  They walked over to the rack and unchained their bicycles, a couple of beat-up jobs nobody would bother to steal. The night felt thick and velvety, but it wasn’t spinning anymore.

  “We ought to talk to Ragland,” said Jack as they pedaled off. “Ask him what’s up.”

  “I gotta eat first,” said Tonel. “Dad’s makin’ that burgoo.”

  “Can I come to your house too?” said Jack. “I don’t want to go home.” And then he told Tonel the story about this morning.

  ”That’s some sad stuff,” said Tonel when Jack finished. “Preachers always do like that. But you sayin’ his children had pointed ears?”

  “Like Danny’s,” sighed Jack. “Everything’s coming apart, just when it’s finally time for me to get out of here. Back on the terrace I thought one of those moths had a woman’s head. And the mibracc—I can hardly believe we saw that. Maybe we’re just really high.”

  “Be some mighty crunk Wheelchair make you see five men turn into somethin’ like chitlins.” They pedaled down Egmont Avenue in silence for a minute, the occasional car rumbling by. Jack didn’t dare try and look at the drivers. Finally Tonel broke the silence. “If you not goin’ by the e-rectory, how we gonna get a ride?” Normally they took Jack’s mother’s car out at night.

  “Ask Vincente for his,” said Jack.

  Tonel’s father Vincente ran a secondhand appliance store called Vaughan Electronics—it so happened that Tonel’s and Jack’s families shared the same last name, which no doubt had something to do with plantations and slaves. Sometimes Jack would tell people that Tonel was his cousin, which wasn’t entirely implausible, light-skinned as Tonel was. Tonel’s mother Wanda had been mostly white. Even though she’d run off to Florida, Vincente had a picture of Wanda on the kitchen wall in his apartment at the back of the store.