Fiction: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café [4]

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4. The first time they had gone

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual person, living, dead, or anywhere in between, is purely a figment of your own sick, twisted imagination. You really ought to seek professional help for that. Except for the cat, of course; that skin on the cover really is  t h e  Dead Cat, if that’s any consolation to you.]

The first time they had gone south into Roseau, the capital, they had passed Vena’s, and Kirk had told him with his closed-mouth smile that vampires lived there. That smile meant either nothing or everything; Kirk might have said that Martians would land on interplanetary unicycles tonight, and that in the morning the sun would rise, and that smile would be there the whole time. When he introduced you to the aliens, he would have sold them some dope, and cadged you a ride with a stoned Martian babe with a nice rack of three green boobs, and off you would go on her space-unicycle, into the rising sun.

    It turned out that Kirk had good reasons for his conclusions about Vena’s, as psychotic as they seemed at the time; but then again Kirk and Rita were just like that. It was probably why they were married. They were both as crazy as shithouse rats. In fact, Ras had been like that most of his life too. Except for a brief and disastrous intermission in Southeast Asia in the early seventies, he had spent his life as a stoned surfer-freak. Upon his return and subsequent recovery from multiple serious wounds, which, given his innate clumsiness, he had considered inevitable, he had become a small-time private investigator. This eventually provided him with a surprisingly good lifestyle, and the money, as one self-help guru had described it, to support a serious addiction. It wasn’t the drab heroin of the usual Nam loser; they’d given him morphine for his pain, but he’d never really gotten a kick out of that. It wasn’t soapers, or Quaaludes, or even the clinical Methedrine you could get from the jet pilots. Oh, no, what got him going was cocaine. Mexican Marching Powder. Bolivian Badness. Peruvian Pink.
    By 1979, he was flying high, with a gorgeous wife, two beautiful baby girls and a nose the size of Nebraska. He and Tabitha had spent the night Hurricane David hit Florida higher than eight hundred Aztecs, partying with friends, including Kirk, in a U-Haul building run by their buddy Steve. The building had started life as a Winn-Dixie grocery store, in the town then known as Eau Gallie. Kirk and Rita would not meet for many years yet, and neither of them knew of the devastation David had wrecked upon the tiny island nation of Dominica; they didn’t even know it existed. What a night that had been! Snorting lines a foot long off a Xerox machine! You hit the button and as the tray moved, you sucked it up to cheers from your friends, who got to whiff whatever you left behind. He and Kirk, along with Freddy and Brian, had gone wandering around during the eye of the storm with their rifles and shotguns, and he had come this close to trying to shoot the antenna off the old drive-in movie screen. Back at the U-Haul building, Brian had been aiming out the double-wide back loading doors and was about to take a shot at that antenna whipping in the wind when something told Erasmus it was time to be cool. He’d developed some kind of second sight in-country, and it was a good thing for Brian that he had. Not three minutes later, a bunch of sheriffs had jumped in front of that doorway with guns drawn, shouting, “Hands up!” Had Brian been aiming that rifle that second, nothing would have kept him from being shot so full of holes his momma wouldn’t have known him. As it was, Ras’ weapons training had saved them: he’d made them all wipe their firearms dry. The cops went over every gun they had, all stacked behind the door, and if there had been a drop of rain on any one of them, they all would have gone to jail. Somebody had seen a bunch of psychos wandering around with guns and, naturally, had called the police. Luckily, the deputies hadn’t gone into Steve’s office, where the coke and weed were laying out for any fool to see.
    By 1987, Ras was hanging on to the last tragic tatters of a failing marriage, a struggling business, and two disillusioned pre-teen girls living, against their wills, alone with Dad in a foreclosed house. What really sucked, he thought at the time, was his piece-of-shit wife, who now moralized about coke when she had been right behind him, line for line, the whole time. Now she was living at their dealer’s house, fucking God knew who-all for the same lines she could have gotten at home. He remembered thinking miserably, as he snorted another bolt in his darkened office on Orange Avenue in downtown Fort Pierce, that things could not possibly get any worse. Well well well; as Rod Stewart said, look how wrong you can be.

Copyright © 2020 by Roger Owens