Fiction: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café [5]

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5. Byron Clayton Tottenmann

[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.]

Byron Clayton Tottenmann drove one of those eighteen-wheeler trucks everyone sees on the interstates and Florida’s Turnpike. Except that his was one of those trucks that carried wrecked cars to the reclamation centers. Crashed cars. Smashed, bashed and trashed cars. Byron had spent time in prison, but really, killing that little girl two doors down had been an accident; he’d been drunk when he ran her over. Everybody knew that. It was why they had let him out way short of the ten he’d been slapped with. That right there, that proved it: if his lawyer hadn’t fucked him he’d have walked. He’d grown up with a father, Lester Clayton, who had lost his first wife in a hurricane in Key West in 1946 and had never really gotten over it. Byron’s half-sister, Porcelain, who was half black, had been much older and had moved away from Miami when he was just a toddler. Anyway, at thirty-two, Byron was tough. The cars shouldn’t have bothered him. But lately, he had taken to looking at them, really looking. It was a bad habit to get into. It made him think about the people who had been in them when they got all crushed and twisted and all.
    He’d also taken to snorting the trash that passed for methamphetamine in those days, and gak, as they called it, was a truly bad habit to get into as well. When he sniffed the gak, and looked at the cars, he saw the blood, the hairs, the teeth. He knew he shouldn’t, but the more he tried to ignore them, the more he envisioned the accidents that had produced those horrific, silent testaments to speed and bloody misfortune. It was like one of those twisted, South Beach artsy-fucks had tried to make sculptures depicting the hazards of modern travel. It wasn’t as if Byron was completely uneducated. He’d taken art-appreciation classes in stir. He just thought most of the shit they got paid millions to put in front of City Halls and County Commission buildings all over Dade county looked like monkeys had made it.
    He didn’t get cars or trucks or SUV’s with minor damage; the vehicles he carted were totaled. Crushed. Destroyed. Chances were good that the folks who’d been in them at the time they were damaged beyond repair had either gone into a box in the dirt farm or spent a year in the hospital, followed by the sunny prospect of a shiny new wheelchair with matching oxygen tank at the wedding of their former sweetheart to their soon-to-be-ex best friend. Byron couldn’t stop thinking about the crashes. The wrecks. The “accidents,” as some were so fond of calling them. He was beginning to see them full time. Well, full time when he was driving. And doing the gak.

Copyright © 2020 by Roger Owens