Squid Pulp Blues by Jordan Krall Page B

grabbed hold of the body and dragged it a few feet away and covered it with the pieces of the cart.
    “Are you alright?” one voice shouted. Peachy ignored him and went back to his car. He dug out his gun and then jogged down the street.
    “I’m calling the cops!” another voice yelled.
    Peachy kept going until he saw Scooter’s Go-Go- Rama . He hadn’t been in there since before being locked up and he was getting erotic stirrings despite the stress of the evening.
    His stomach rumbled so clinched his ass cheeks, knowing what to expect. A wet squeak escaped followed by a spurt of liquid shit. Should of brought an extra fucking diaper , he thought. He walked down the alley next to the go-go bar and started to take down his pants when he saw the body.
    At first his mind didn’t register it as a body because he saw the comic first. The drawings were so vivid, so bold, that Peachy couldn’t help but respect it as a piece of art and not just magic marker scribbling on the back of a corpse.
    Pants down to his knees, his dirty diaper drooping with the weight of diarrhea, Peachy read the comic strip three times. He was no fan of comic strips, comic books, or art in general but this adventure of Fauntleroy LeRoux entranced him with a bittersweet vertigo. His head swam in an increasingly psychotic state, his brain cells screaming the apocalyptic hymns of Little Bing Bong.
    Down the alley, a group of longheads watched intently. One of them grunted and Peachy looked at them. They laughed and continued pissing into empty wine bottles. Deep yellow urine filled each and every one. When the last longhead was done, they muttered words that Peachy could not hear and then as quick as it takes for one’s eye to register a snowflake falling to the ground, the urine in the bottles became deep red wine.
    The longheads proceeded to get drunk while Peachy pulled up his pants, half mad with visions of jack-ass eschatology. He ran onto the sidewalk and then across the street, stumbling to the ticket booth of the movie theatre. The words Barbara Stanwyck Film Festival swirled off of the marquee and into his brain. He didn’t know what Stanwyck looked like but he sensed her as if she was a long-lost lover who was present in spirit only.
    “How many tickets?” the teenage ticket seller asked. He gave a face, seeing the diaper sticking out of the top of Peachy’s pants.
    “I don’t know…what are you….unveiling tonight?” Peachy slurred his speech and felt the sudden urge to wag his tail that is, if he possessed one.
    The guy pointed to the sign in back of him. “A bunch of classic Barbara Stanwyck movies. Are you interested?”
    “Give me a minute,” Peachy replied, wanting so much to take his elephant tusk gun and beat the ticket seller to a bloody pulp and then use those pieces of pulp in a display of snowy, blood-soaked divination.
    He settled on buying a ticket.
    “For an extra five dollars more, would you like a Barbara Stanwyck Halloween mask?” He held up the mask.
    Peachy looked at the seductive features of the mask and felt his heart flutter a warning.
    “Shove it up your ass!’ Peachy said. With a grunt and a curse, he fell backwards into the snow and crawled away from the theatre.
    “ You shove it up your ass!” the ticket seller laughed while he started rolling a joint.
    Chapter 9
    “Hey, pull over for a second,” Jake said. He tapped the window with his knuckles.
    “What for?” Tommy slowed the car down.
    “Just pull over.”
    A parking spot opened up in front of the liquor store so Tommy pulled right in. “Okay. Now what?”
    Jake gave a half smile. “I’m starting to think you might’ve been right.”
    “About what?”
    “About this whole situation. I mean, why are we running? It’s like we turned into a bunch of paranoid assholes all of a sudden.”
    Tommy stared Jake. “What the hell is this? I told you that you were overreacting from the get-go. Christ Almight . I can’t believe this