Fiction: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café [6]

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6. Tabitha Taft was sick

[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.]

Tabitha Taft was sick and tired of her husband’s shit. He had become such an asshole even she couldn’t stand him, and she loved him. She knew he thought she was a coke whore, but the truth was she had hardly fucked anybody since they’d split, whatever he thought. She had certainly never fucked Commercial Mike, the coke dealer, even though her husband had accused her of it. Like she didn’t fucking-well know he had banged whiff-sucking bitches right there in Mike’s living room. She could hardly stand to sit on the couch, just thinking about it. That night, when she came to pick up the girls to go visit her mother in Melbourne, the son of a bitch hadn’t even come home yet. He was probably, she thought bitterly, snorting blow in his office downtown with the fucking lights off. She was short with the girls, and by the time she got them buckled in to the back seat of her 1985 Plymouth she was sorry. It wasn’t their fault. They were caught between two flawed and addicted parents, and she wanted to tell them they hadn’t done anything wrong. But she forgot to say so, because she’d done a few lines before picking them up. She never got a chance to say anything to them after that.
    Byron too had been acting erratically for days, and he knew it. He’d done his best to hide it from his supervisors, making sure to fill out all of his paperwork properly so as not to call attention to himself. The gak helped with that, allowing him to stay awake while he ploughed through it all. But his night-time runs had become more and more like waking nightmares. As he drove through the darkness, he saw a detailed procession of the gory demise of each of his mangled vehicular passengers, particles of whom were often left in the vehicles themselves. The vehicles were supposed to be cleaned thoroughly, but often it just wasn’t possible to get all of the blood and tissue out of them. And the guys doing the cleaning were just like him, working stiffs with their own problems and demons and addictions.

    He’d been whiffing more gak to try to kill those images. In spite of this, he continued to see before him, in the reflection of his own windshield, the blue Chevrolet as the woman who hit the fireplug flew through her windshield, her face shattering into a mass of screaming red death as the glass scattered onto the road. He saw the white Ford pickup rolling over the surprised high-school cowboy thrown halfway out the driver’s window, his guts shooting from his mouth while the top half of his slim young body separated from the lower half. He saw the silver Saturn going under the eighteen-wheel highboy, taking off the heads of the nice man, his wife, and his two teenage sons along with the car’s roof. The body of their golden Retriever was still in the car, stuck under the front seat breeding flies. How could the cleaning crew have missed that? That car was still so full of blood that when it had rained somewhere between Boca Raton and Jupiter, some red-brown horror had leaked down onto the Hunter-green Jag. Byron had noticed it while fueling up at the Fort Pierce truck plaza and had tried to wash it off with the service hose. And the Jag! He laughed wildly as he thought about it, his grin looking like a scream in his rearview as he shifted gears, going up an overpass, riding north on the meth. Nice thing, driving a truck in Florida, no hills to worry about. At about ninety, the Jag had wrapped itself around a power pole on the passenger side, uniting the honeymooning couple inside in a bloody, soupy embrace that would last throughout eternity. It had taken a tow truck on one end and a fire-department ladder truck on the other to straighten it out enough to forklift it onto the bottom rear cradle of his transport. Coming down the overpass bridge, Byron began to cry.
    He turned up his stereo. This rig had an awesome boomer, a CD player, and nine speakers. Pink Floyd was raging, “Run Like Hell,” the guitar echoing, the voices on reverb, and when they sang “Ah, ah, ah, ah” over and over, he saw the wrecks. Blue waves seemed to be coming at Byron through the air, the high sodium lamps at the next interchange were pulsing in time to the music, he was crying, and he was pushing the pedal down to the floor. He didn’t know why he was crying, why he was flying over 100 miles an hour in a huge rig, but then, he didn’t know much these days and he just couldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop the tears running down his face and he couldn’t stop the horrific images of highway carnage in his head and he couldn’t stop the truck. He was seeing the crashes again, and they were all running together, so that after each “Ah!” by Floyd there was a wreck, a bad one, then another, and another. Heads went through roofs, babies through windshields, lovely wives were tossed onto the unforgiving pavement and then driven over by horrified husbands in their own cars. “Ah!” Bam! “Ah!” Crunch! “Ah!” Boom! “Ah!” Wham!! Bones crackled, brains splattered, blood flew in scarlet rainbows of gore. Retirees in Cadillacs were crushed under citrus trucks driven by illegal aliens. Children were squashed beyond recognition by drunk drivers. Pregnant mothers were eviscerated by falling highway signs, unborn fetuses spread like strawberry jam across uncaring lanes of speeding, heedless traffic. He made up new sounds to go with the twisting metal, the shattering glass, the broken, helpless humanity. “Ah!” Spish! “Ah!” Doosh! “Ah!” Bawang! “Ah!” Booyah! Byron was laughing now, while he cried and drove his foot against the pedal so hard he had to hold himself down with the steering wheel.

    Tabitha Taft was just driving slowly onto I-95 from the on-ramp at Indrio Road when Byron hit the top of the overpass at just over one hundred twenty miles per hour. He didn’t even see the Plymouth carrying the woman, high on cocaine, and the two sleepy children, or the tour bus she was following. He was standing over the wheel, jamming his foot on the accelerator, not even looking at the road. When he hit the trunk of Tabitha’s car, the front of the eighteen-wheeler full of wrecked autos actually left the ground. It came crashing down on top of Ras’ family, mashing them flat in a messy stew of blood, glass, flesh, steel, vinyl, and diesel fuel. The shredded body of Byron Clayton Tottenmann was blasted through the windshield and fiberglass of the cab, landing in a bloody, twitching mess atop the Transtar tour bus as it traveled north.
    A cast of destroyed vehicles were joined in a stage production of death, screaming down the highway shooting fountains of sparks, exploding into the crowded bus ahead of them. Already-battered cars, their drivers and passengers among the recently dead, tumbled away in independent directions, showering fragmentation grenades of sheet metal and broken steel chain. A tan GM pickup, already responsible for the deaths of a wealthy Pahokee farmer and his cancer-stricken wife, crushed Jasper Rufus Johnson and his eight-year-old daughter, Lottie Jane, to death in his brown Taurus. They had been going to visit his ex-wife, Porcelain Jones – Byron’s half-sister – in Orlando. Byron had just killed his own niece, but he would never know it. Porcelain would miss Lottie Jane; she had been named for Porcelain’s mother’s best friend back in Key West, before she had died in a hurricane.
    A drab white Volvo station wagon, with a bloody head-print pushed out from the front glass, ploughed its solid, safe front end through the windshield of a minivan full of jubilant cheerleaders on their way back to Port Saint Lucie after watching their team kick ass all over the Merritt Island Mustangs, one of the toughest teams on the Florida High School circuit. The entire squad, including the stunningly beautiful coach, driver, and senior English teacher, Mrs. Jeanette Hamilton, were destroyed, instantly transformed from human beings into blood and bone and filth.
    Jeanette Hamilton’s husband, Jack, was her High School sweetheart, Boy’s Dean at the school, and coach of the track team. He had just been listening to a personal message on their new home answering machine from his wife’s seventeen-year-old female lover, one of the girls on the cheerleading squad, when the phone rang. He answered in a flat monotone. The girl had referred to something his wife had said about him grunting when they made love. Grunting. Like a pig. The girl had laughed and told his wife to make sure to erase the message before her husband got home. The officer on the line was sorry to tell him some bad news, which, for Jack, was essentially that both his wife and her under-age lover were corpses. Jack spoke to the sorrowful officer in a neutral voice, thanked him for calling, and, when the officer asked if Jack would need someone to come talk with him about it, declined. The officer was still talking when Jack set the telephone on the cradle (the phone they had whispered love-talk on? the phone they had made fun of his grunting on?). The phone rang again, it rang and rang. The machine, in their ridiculous laughing voices, happy voices, said, “It’s Jack’n’Jean, leave a message!” Someone began to talk on the message machine. Whoever it was sounded very serious.
    Jack didn’t answer. He walked into the den and opened the bottom drawer, where he kept his grandfather’s US Army model 1911 .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol and put it in his mouth. He wondered if it still worked, if there was a round in the chamber, if the gun was loaded at all. His grandfather’s pistol had killed many a Nazi in the war, and it didn’t let Jack down now.
    The brand-new, now-totaled Ford Explorer above Byron’s cab, right in the front spot, broke loose and flipped over onto the rear roof of the bus. It instantly crushed dozens of elderly Jewish northerners on their way home from the Florida vacation of a lifetime. At some point, the investigators said later, the whole truck-car-bus conglomeration caught fire. Only six people made it off the bus. The driver, Herkimer A. (Morty) Mortenson of Poughkeepsie, New York, died of smoke inhalation, having gone back inside the burning bus trying to save what he thought was an injured passenger. Someone seemed to be calling for help. It turned out to have been a miniature poodle owned by Sarah Gideon Meir, a distant relative of Golda Meir, former Prime Minister of Israel, and just now deceased in a burning bus in Florida. She had hidden the dog in a large purse made of plastic grocery bags, all twisted and knitted together into a carry-all intended to save the environment. The poodle didn’t make it either. It was found, thoroughly roasted, encased in a coat of charred plastic.

Copyright © 2020 by Roger Owens