THE UNTOUCHABLES

a short story by

HARRY BEHEMOTH

� SHOCKING STORIES (MMXXV)

I have a misshapen skull. I have a lop-sided protrusion at the crown of my cranium that looks like maybe I was marked for priesthood in a Paracan or Egyptian society as an infant, and during the skull-shaping process they fucked it up. What I had was a neglectful alcoholic for a mother. Not to mention an "actor" father who, upon news of my birth, had taken French leave to star in a traveling production of "Cabaret." This, in itself, wasn't bad - it was his taking up with the Kurzweil girls, the conjoined twins from Hamburg. As it turned out, his off-stage role as an AWOL father was a permanent engagement, though his professional career was decidedly sublunary. It was after a humiliating onstage meltdown doing "Oh! Calcutta!" for which he was actually cited for lewdness, public indecency, and sexual assault, that his career degenerated into traveling incognito as a female impersonator, most often Joan Rivers. Over the years, I can remember my mother, misty-drunk as always, staring at my skull in a malevolent stupor, and hissing, "You're father was a goddamn faggot! His DNA was weak!" And take another drink. Sometimes she would thump my cone. "And I was a goddamn fag hag." And dissolve into tears. At that, his name was one of the first squares on the AIDS quilt. Anyway, I've never had a real father-figure in my life. But I've never directly blamed that on my misshapen skull.

My mother was herself a drama queen, or "theatre-whore" as my grandmother (maternal) told it. But in the aftermath of a very difficult pregnancy, near-fatal birthing, and abandonment by a very weak man, she let her "career" lapse, except for amateur engagments she performed every day. So I was born with a theatrical bent. I made my strange deformity work for me. As I child, I was always cast in school plays as a troll, ogre or otherwise anthropomorphic creature. I won every costume prize at Halloween usually as a Sasquatch, Chewbacca, or a Gorilla, and in High School I was a smash as Frankenstein's monster. The kids at school affectionately called me "Beldar" after the Conehead character on SNL. This was before the age of political correctness in public schools. But I was sharp-witted and rambunctious, and held my own. I had many friends eventually, as I was social and gregarious despite my deformity. "Irrepressible," as my mother used to say over a scotch on the rocks, her eyes clouded with liquor and maudlin sentiment, giving me one of her rare little half-smiles that only I could tell from a grimace.

So I was lonely. The summer before I entered high school, of course I wanted a girlfriend badly, but had no luck as the girls in my town had a phobia toward my promontory. I was in despair and hopeless that my cone would ever be honed, as it were.

And then the circus came to town.

Everyone in every small town has been to the cheesy traveling carnivals of lethal cotton candy, treacherous death rides of uncertain mechanical function, shoddy prizes as bait to waste two bits on a rigged game of "skill," and every carny reminding one of a TV Crimestoppers rogue gallery or the Wanted posters at the Post Office. Sometimes they might have a striped-ass ape in a cage to exhibit, one that always, very understandably, masturbated furiously and flung his feces and jizz at the yokel gawkers. Maybe a two-headed baby in a jar of formaldehyde and a bearded lady who gave handjobs for half-a-sawbuck after hours. Many odd and bizarre things to amaze and confound the cretinous psyche. Back in the 50's my Uncle Jack said they used to have a "men only" tent where semi-naked girls danced the hoochie-koo, and sideshows where a subnormal "geek" would bite the heads off chickens. And as late as the 70's, you could count on a gypsy fortune-teller travelling with any carnival what was a carnival.

But this circus was different. Foreign, no less. The exotic Prana Ananda Circus came all the way from India. A full-fledged entertainment, with a Big-Top for animal acts and novelty features, not just a rusty cage featuring a crazed ape jerking off and slinging shit and jism. I remember what a parade they put on, strutting down main street, old mullah-fakirs in turbans tootling away on curious clarinets, horrific demon wolf-headed clowns wearing huge curled-toe floppy shoes with shrill bells, amazing flame-eaters and jugglers, huge elephants trumpeting madly, mahouts astride their necks, beautiful Roma girls standing bareback on high-stepping horses in their spangled sparkly costumes, and a retinue of exotic animals shitting everywhere (followed by cheerful tidy pygmies scooping the poop into baskets).

And then I saw her.

The most unusual feature of the Prana Ananda, or any circus, was the Girl Goddess Malayla, she of the four exquisitely proportioned and wondrously dexterous, graceful arms, the very Incarnation of the Goddess Kali. She was on a raised platform on a decorated float, pulled by zebra's and accompanied by eight very tough-looking Sikh's in ceremonial garb and turbans, glittering scimitars cinched in their sash. Malayla was dressed in a wondrous irridescent rainbow-colored silk outfit with pearls, gold and silver trim and uncountable anklets, bracelets, and costly gems adorning her lithe, elegant form. Her skin was the loveliest robin's-egg blue.

She was dancing to rhythmic drums, the Dance of The Soul, performing many beautiful and intricate moves, jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring, at one point describing a complete somersault revolution in a gliding, undulating hypnotic wave that produced an audible gasp from the stunned onlookers.

She literally took my breath away, my heart swelled up in my chest, I was at once exalted and utterly rent. Here was someone far more different than me, yet even more unattainable than the common pubescent tweener pudenda's of my fevered delusions. She was a Vision of Paradise, an utterly impossible, even unimaginable, dream. She was a legendary beauty, and I was a miscreant beast. As she passed, I sought her glowing, entrancing emerald-green eyes. She caught my gaze and smiled! I was transported. She paused and pressed the delicate fingers of her four lovely hands to her lips, and?blew me a KISS?BY GOD!

I was too weak to follow as her light passed on. The shocked gaze of the parade-goers, as uncertain as if they had seen a miracle or mirage, or maybe witnessed a UFO landing, betrayed an incomprehension common to victims of disaster or divine favor.

But she was real.

Real enough a church of redneck Pentecostals had determined to picket the circus as "celebrating satanic idols" in that Maha-Kali, aka Malayla, was the Goddess of Death and Destruction, and therefore demonic, and furthermore, a spiritual threat to the virtues of the good Chrustian peepul of Peckerwood Bend, Alabama, and the greater world at large, freedom of religion be damned.

My grandmother belonged to this church, the Peckerwood Creek Pentecostal Church of the True Christ with Signs and Wonders Following, an offshoot faction of an apocalyptic Charismatic congregation specializing in snake-handling, among other faith-based lunacies. In addition to fondling serpents and drinking poison, they hated queers with a passion, and operated a "Sin-Reorientation" camp as an "outreach ministry." The pastor of this tax-free bubbling cauldron of righteousness was Brother Malachi Malarky. Brother Malachi was always coming round our house, trying to persuade my mother to fly with his flock. He tried familial guilt, but my mother was well past cynical and could not have given a fuck less. So he took to promising her a fifth of Hiram Walker Scotch ("Old Tennis Shoe") for attending. When funds were low, she occasionally graced the pews in order to get her drink on, but I don't think she had succumbed to any other form of nihilistic desperation, yet then.

Not that Malachi Malarky wasn't a fascinating, striking figure of a man. LOL. A shock of utterly unkempt flaming red hair atop a bony equine skull at the end of a giraffean neck, the crowning grace of an erect, towering egret-postured knotty body, the most prominent "knot" a whipcord pipe in his tight trousers that became more pronounced as he lathered himself up into a messianic fervor during his pulpit fulminations. Thus, he always had a gaggle of prospective bitches eager for the paroxysms of apostolic rapture, as it were, even if my mother was unimpressed. Myself, I liked him. His skull was fucked up almost as bad as mine, and he never failed to include some candy-bars for me when he brought my mother her "Old Tennis Shoe." Usually, he also brought some McDonald's which beat the hell out of our usual Sunday repast of beanie-weenees and Kraft dinner. So yeah, I liked him.

But there was no way in Hell I was going to let this Ferd Berkel clown and his gang of superstitious trogladytes harass the Living Deity Malayla, she of the divine mystery. Not a chance in Hell. Not after she blew me a kiss.

* * *

I should digress. As I said, the parade of the circus animals produced steaming heaps of dung, from camels to zebras and common equine turds. The huge mounds of dump produced by a pair of Nepalese elephants was accompanied by contrapuntal flatulence reminiscent of brass gongs. The circus employed a tribe of pygmies of uncertain origin, diminuitive brown creatures who used shovel and barrow to expeditiously clean up the animal ordure as it happended. They were cheerful and industrious, and sang as they pursued the distasteful but necessary task. A couple of dozen, at least, with teams of buckets and mops to complete the job. The old avenue had never been so clean. Yet there had been some hateful verbal disparagement hurled at them from the type of verminous peckerwoods who hate everything and everybody. The looks of bewilderment and hurt on the faces of some of the little people burned my soul. THEM, I wanted to protect in any way I could, even if I had to go it alone. I knew how it felt.

So, anyway, the parade was over, and there were hours before the first performance. I determined to go home first and maybe recon the church to get a bead on what these loons might be up to.

My mom kept a gun somewhere in her disaster-area bedroom. Not the tidiest or most fastidious of females, I waded through her strewn and stained underwear like Gollum through the Dead Marshes. Sure enough, in the top drawer of her night-stand, lay a .32 Sig-Sauer automatic, eight in the clip, a girly gun, a weapon small enough to fit in a weak, unmartial woman's hand - right beneath a mottled shotglass and empty bottle of Hiram Walker. So I figured she was at Malachi's church, at the emergency meeting called to deal with the threat of exotic heathens. I checked the clip and the chamber, there was only one bullet in the clip - but one was better than none. I checked the safety and realized I didn't know if it was in the on or off position. I didn't have the luxury of firing off a round to check it, so I left it where it was. I figured my mother would prefer not to be bothered by that detail above the risk of a fatal accident. I jumped on my Western Auto Flyer and pedaled furiously toward the Peckerwood Creek Pentecostal Church of the True Christ with Signs and Wonders Following, to see what was up.

It was boiling hot, cloudless, and the insects were already jittering in full-moon voice. In mid-summer Alabama, the Sun doesn't click it down a notch until twilight, and the swelter lasts all night. So, at midday, my malformed noggin was moist and slick like a stalagmite.

The church was located across the railroad tracks at the far end of a dirt road hard-by the river, a chuck-holed crooked pike with just enough gravel to bust the occasional windshield. You had to pass the Norco Steel coke-smelting plant, its noxious fumes farts of hell-fire and brimstone, although only one shift a day since America's demise in the steel industry. Over the years, the plant's slag lagoon had grown like a malignant tumor to smother and engulf a brackish marsh, that once, so the hippies told it, was home to numerous birds and fishes. Now, not even a toad croaked. Just an insane chorus of cicada's, who will drive you crazy if you listen to their mockery. And the smell! My Uncle Jack compared it to a backed-up sewer running beneath an unventilated Saigon whore-house, at low tide. Myself, my own experience more prosaic, I thought it smelled like a terminally-sick cat vomiting diseased hairballs into a pile of its own bloody feces. Everyone in town had their own description of the stench, the most pleasant being vulture excrement after it had eaten the rotten end of a dead formerly menstruating skunk. But, as it was the only game in town as far as jobs, people got used to the stink, as poor people always do. Malachi's church stood sentinel and witness to visceral necessity, a forlorn hope against hope, the deadest of dead ends.

As I passed, I was glad this place was as far as possible from the town fairgrounds. I hoped none of the olfactory abomination would waft its way to the delicate nostrils of the Living Goddess Malayla, and cause them to flare in distaste at the rottenness of Peckerwood Bend. When I reached the church, I realized the abominable slag heap wasn't the worst stink in town. Inside, I could hear the choir raising the roof with the Puritan hymn "Old Hundred," reworked in a call-and-response blues style. Malachi would really wail on his old Telecaster in response to the lyrics: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow (wah-wah-wuh-WAH-deetle-tee-dee-deet-deetle-deedully-dee), Praise Him all creatures here below (duh-duh-da-deetle-dee-DOO-DOO-da-da-DOODLY-DOO), Praise Him above, ye heavenly host (DAH-DAHHH-DA-DUH-DEEDLY-DEE), Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (dah-duh-dah-deetly-deedly-diddly-doo-doo-dah-dah)," the congregation stretching out "Ghhooossstttt," just right, vocals and guitar ending together. By God, those miserable miscreant malignant magnificent rabble were FULL of the fervor, and Malachi could really wail. Sufficiently primed, I could hear Malachi gallop off on a rant, which I hoped wasn't directed against Malayla. I would rather use my one bullet on most anybody but him, preferably nobody. I paused to consider the decorations of the church's exterior, as I always did, before entering. I mean, one couldn't help it. Even in my motivated agitation, the bizarre embellishments Malachi had created to catch the eye certainly left one agape.

For one thing, the entire cinder-block building was painted a bright blood-red, not the most decorous of colors to induce spiritual introspection. Local punks had defaced the walls with profanity and pornography - once. The sight of the unfortunate Denny Pratt (case still unsolved), ringleader of the teenage iconoclasts, hanging from a large live oak just up the road, put the quietus on would-be vandals. And Malachi had commissioned a mural featuring his favorite fractured religious iconography - still in outline form - to adorn those walls. Leviathan and Behemoth surging up to extract vengeance in the final days - a convoluted serpent constricting a very alarmed and repentant Adam and Eve in his coiled embrace - and the Great Horned Satan himself, chained to a rock, having his liver ripped out by a buzzard - was certainly calculated to produce a most sanguine genuflection. I tore my eyes away only to be startled by the newest artistic adornment - the paper-mache sculpture of "Chaldean Jesus" above the vestibule - his crown, garments and curly beard more in a Babylonian than traditional Christian style. "Jesus" had his right foot firmly planted on the skeletal neck of a black-robed "Grim Reaper" (the Reaper's scythe stuck up his butt) and his left foot in the midst of a shattered globe, representing the evil world.

Malachi's Michaelangelo for this artistic apotheosis was a former art teacher fired for "moral turpitude" at Peckerwood Bend High School, a "Mr. Splooge." As far as I knew or wanted to know, "Mr. Splooge" and my mother were the only congregants whose faithfulness was purchased with alcohol. I shuddered, and fixing to enter, when a thunderous "Hallelujah" erupted from the congregation, and a general bustle signified an imminent egress. So I stood my ground.

The doors flew open and first out was my school-house nemesis - an ugly, pimply amalgam of misshapen bones known as Bugs McGoo. A fat, blubber-lipped piece of shite bulky enough to bully younger and smaller kids in the school-yard, he never failed to berate me. "Goddamn! When did they let you out of Glamis Castle, Glammy?" he cackled, pleased with his comic-book wit. Ordinarily, I let him blow, not out of fear, more of distaste and disgust. Today was different. I pistol-whipped his bulbous nose with the butt-end of the .32, and from the crack and fountainous effusion of blood, was pretty sure I broke it.

The emerging gaggle of red-necks were aghast at my unwonted violence, and a general cacophany of abuse was tempered by the .32 I still held in my hand. The murder of peckerwoods parted, and Malachi emerged, accompanied by Cletus McGoo, Bugs's daddy and Malachi's sergeant-at-arms. I saw my granny and mother bringing up the rear, my mother's eyes cloudy from drink, her habitual sneer of existential contempt somewhat more pronounced than usual.

"He's crazy! I never did nuthin' to him!" Bugs sniveled, his dime-store shirt, corduroy pants and Buster Brown shoes splattered with his watery blood.

"You little bastid," Cletus cursed, and took a step toward me - halting at the sight of the upraised .32. Malachi stared at me with consternation and anger.

"What the hell is wrong with you, boy?" he barked.

"You leave Malayla alone, you mule-eared sumbitch," I answered, my voice tremulous with anger, not fear.

Malachi looked at my mother. "We can't be having this," he said.

My mother just looked at me. "He's only got one bullet," she said. "And the safety's on."

Malachi was on me in a flash, but I managed to flip the safety. But the trigger wouldn't budge! Lying bitch! "As stupid as he is ugly," she sniffed. My granny just looked at me with her perpetual "who farted" look.

Malachi knocked the gun out of my grasp with a sweep of his left hand and punched me in the teeth with the bony knuckles of his right fist. I saw stars and down I went. Amidst the welter of blows and kicks visited upon me by the aroused congregants, I could see my mother sipping from her flask and my granny's pursed liver-lips, smirking in satisfaction.

"That's enough!" Malachi shouted, after the vengeful parishioners had exhausted themselves. I had curled up fetal in a ball like an armadillo, but I had no protective plate. I was very sadly bruised, battered and bloody. Malachi exhorted his flock, now roused to a blood-lust befitting his purpose. "We have more important business today!" he screamed. "Go home, arm yourself with the armor of the Lord, reflect in righteous anger, and meet back at the slaughterhouse at five o'clock." He looked around wildly at all, his eyes bugged out with looniness. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lawd, and we are the Lawd's poor instruments! We shall drive these heathen idolators from our midst!" The yeehaws from the yahoo's told me he was in the midst of kindred spirits.

I laid there while the rabble dispersed, some spinning their wheels to pelt me with stinging gravel. I heard the crunch of twisting metal and an inner-tube exploding, and looked up to see Cletus and Bugs running over my Western flyer in their Ford pickup, grinning malevolently at my bloody woe-begone face. "Go to hell, you ugly freak!" they hollered. As Cletus was the chief deputy to the Sheriff, I knew there was no sense reporting anything.

I cried. I'm not ashamed to admit it. I sat there and blubbered like a baby for I don't know how long, occasionally furiously rubbing my deformed skull and cursing myself. Finally, I heaved a long sigh, thanked God I still had time to warn the circus folk, quit sniveling like a little bitch, picked myself up and dusted myself off, straightened my backbone, and began the long walk into town like a man, upright on my hind legs and looking forward.

I wished the Goddess Malayla could see me now. Bloody nose, busted lip, torn jeans, ruptured heart, limping along a lonely backroad, suffering on her behalf. That's the thing about being a martyr, getting your ass whipped was a requirement of the job. Without blood and pain sacrifice is not sacrifice and means nothing. I sniffed in self-pity and my eyes watered. No stoic hero after all.

As I shambled along in my misery, a car slowly approached, a car I recognized. My uncle Jack! In his fire-red ragtop Rocket '88. He stopped, grinned at me kindly, and got out. He put his hand on my shoulder, and I felt immeasurably better. "I once saw a Siamese cat claw hell out of a bulldog's face," he said. "He ended up 'bout like you." He patted me on the back and I felt ten feet tall. "Let's get you cleaned up, and plot our campaign. This ain't over. Not by a damned sight." I was too choked up to say anything, but I didn't have to. Uncle Jack knew.

Uncle Jack had been to Korea and Viet Nam. He retired as a Master Sergeant from the military police in the Army. He served his last duty detached as a guard at Maxwell Air Force Base Federal Prison in Montgomery, or "Club Fed," as they called it, for all the rich politicians and business tycoons. They had their own golf course, tennis courts, luxury mess hall. Jack said a Pusan street whore in a walk-up gloryhole crib had more class than all of the rich cons put together. When things got too slimy, he retired and came home to Peckerwood Bend. He could've been a cop but he always said, "A downward spiral only has so many revolutions before you're flushed." He lived off his pension and what he could get hustling guitar gigs in blues bars. He was even better than Malachi, and they had a musical rivalry of sorts.

Uncle Jack was my mother's much-older half-brother, son of a different mother, and was cordially hated by my mother and grandmother, whom he referred to as the "Old Dragon and her hatchling." He never came to our house but somehow or other always managed to run into me around town, and was always giving me pocket change and cigarettes. He took me to his girlfriend Charlotte's place, an old bar and grille on Main Street of course named the Dew Drop Inn. We went up the back steps to Charlotte's apartment above the bar, and he cleaned me up and gave me one of his shirts. Charlotte came up the steps from her enterprise and joined us just as Jack was doctoring my busted lip with mercurochrome.

"Owww-ooww!" I cried, Charlotte grinning her pirate-grin at me, giving me a kiss at the top of my cone, and squeezing my shoulders, her soft bosoms like comfortable pillows against my neck and shoulder-blades. A part of me saluted in tribute.

"Tough guy," she teased. "Mr. Bad-Ass." She gave Jack a smooch. "Against my better judgment, I served some of those idiot peckernecks from that idiot church," she told us. "After all, their money is green, like anybody else's. But I didn't like the shit they were talking. Talking about taking cattle prods and baseball bats to those circus people. Tarring and feathering that pretty little blue girl with the four arms."

I started up and Jack calmed me down with his hands on my shoulders. "Settle down, Sport. I gotchee covered." Jack gave me a squinty-eyed grin. "Know how to make a bomb out of your own piss?" I shook my head. Jack grinned. "It takes a lotta piss." Charlotte favored Jack with a squinty-eyed pirate glance of her own.

"We still have a bit of the glycerin," she informed him. Jack whooped.

"Alright alright alright. Come on, Sport. No time like the present to learn," he told me. Looking back on it, I learned more about life on this one day than any other day in my life.

"You can make fuses out of that old cordite twine," Charlotte advised.

"Do we have any of those radio-frequency triggers left?" Jack asked. Charlotte smiled a pleased smile.

"I had almost forgotten about those," she replied. "Yes, we should have a complete box, with the blasting caps too," she informed. "Look in the pantry underneath the bar cloths,' she advised.

Jack bussed her smiling lips and encircled her with his arms in a loving embrace. "What did I ever do to get so lucky with you?" he teased.

"Things," Charlotte smiled. "Ever now and again you're good for something." She goosed Jack's ass and he whooped. "Try to stay out of jail. Keep Sport out, too."

"Hell, when I was his age, I'd done been to Juvy twice. 'Bout time he stuck it to the man." Jack reflected.

"Tell me about it," Charlotte said. Charlotte had been an anti-war protester in her flower-child days and spent time in the slammer for "Disorderly Conduct" and "Trespassing" on Government property, among other contretemps. Although Jack was a veteran, he loved her more for her rebellious spirit. She gave Jack a big smooch on the lips. "Be careful." A wink and a pat on the back and Charlotte turned to go down the stairs to the bar. Jack goosed her ass and she whooped.

Jack watched her go in admiration. "Sport, the most important thing in a man's life is finding a good woman to love." Thinking of Malayla, I knew he got that right. Uncle Jack winked. "Let's go make some piss-bombs."

Out of Charlotte's utility closet, Uncle Jack lifted a 20-gallon lard bucket filled with something heavy, a reek of ammonia seeping from under the lid. "Prison is the poor man's finishing school. I had a prisoner, a radical doing five years at Leavenworth as an accessory to the bombing of ROTC buildings, taught me this." Jack looked in the pantry, removed the bar cloths, and sure enough, there were the RF triggers and the box of blasting caps. "Alright alright alright. Now we got a party." Jack handed me the RF triggers and said, "Be careful. Don't dislodge the antennas." He toted the bucket outside in the alley behind the bar, and I followed. He opened the lid.

"Goddamn that stinks!" Jack exclaimed. No shit. The globs of gluey nitre smelled like an open sewer catering to bears with ruined kidneys. Jack laughed. "About three years into their sentence, this old rabble-rouser blew their cell door off with four of these. Didn't get far, though. After the court added another five years for the attempted escape, they knocked four off just to get 'um to tell us how they did it." Jack rummaged around on the shelf. "Ah! The cordite twine. We'll make fuses out of this, as back up." He scrummaged round in a dark corner. "Here it is! The last of the glycerin!" He handled a decanter slowly and carefully. "This is what makes it potentially volatile, this is the catalyst. Pour this and a little mercury fulminate into the middle of the nitre, let this stuff congeal for a few hours, and we got a party." Jack carefully lifted a black-metal gas can into the light.

"It's real simple. You strain your piss through cheesecloth, let it dry, and scrape the nitre off. You roll it into a ball, and let it age. After a while, it gets potentially volatile, with the right catalyst. Simple gunpowder will work, or even bleach will mix with the ammonia and produce a poison gas, but glycerin mixed with mercury fulminate makes the best fuel-air explosive catalyst." Jack sniffed at the nozzle. "You can also make fuses out of the dried membranes of hard-boiled eggs, which is what this prisoner did. Ingenious really. This ole Red worked in the kitchen - that's where they found they ingredients, there and the janitor's closet."

"Sounds like a lotta trouble," I said.

"It was," Jack agreed. "But outta all the years I was an MP, this was the most impressive thing I ever saw." Jack laughed again. "Pressure and time. The pressure of doing time. A mind in prison is still a formidable weapon. That's all it takes. Pressure and time." Jack tapped the radio frequency detonator box. "But of course these radio frequency devices work better." Jack winked. "Let's go to work."

* * *



End OF PART ONE