Chapter 1
The Backdoor Byway
Charlie Debunk drops two lead balls, plunk-plunk, into the flared
mouth of his flintlock Blunderbuss. The balls tumble down the rusty barrel like
fishline sinkers. He sets the antique weapon across his legs and picks up a red
clay jug of cornjuice. He takes long happy drinks that scorch his gullet and
muddle his head.
Charlie Debunk has been loading his Blunderbuss for a week and
has yet to pull the trigger. He is waiting for something special to shoot. Five
days and a hundred miles ago he and his two partners made a trade with a big
lunking Polack who calls himself Big Polack. Big Polack gave Charlie the gun,
along with a pouch of lead balls, a pouch of powder, a pouch of flints, a
twenty-inch ramrod, and a pouch of gold nuggets easily worth five hundred
dollars. Charlie and his partners, Eddie Plague and Skunk Brewster, in turn,
gave Big Polack a ten-year-old aborigine girl they had liberated from a
starving tribe of Chickasaws. Charlie figures they got the better end of the
deal. The girl had not even been old enough to noodle and had whooped like a
warrior when Charlie noodled her anyway.
Charlie pours powder into the long muzzle of the black-iron
red-rust rifle, rips a piece of rag and rams it with his ramrod, in and out. It
makes him think about noodling, which makes him think about Bitch Bantam, the
fully-grown woman he has chained to a tree.
Charlie's youngest partner in the white slavery concern, Eddie
Plague, is preoccupied with other things, none of which has anything to do with
noodling the savage bitch. Eddie prefers people who are free of stink. He would
no more consider physical relations with the bitch than with either of his two
idiot partners. Very soon Eddie will be done with them all. They will sell the
pit-woman, split the take and sever ties.
Eddie looks to the horizon. He has seen cityscapes in his years,
but he has never seen what he sees now, camped here alongside the Backdoor
Byway. On a backdrop of smokestack black, mysterious giant white rings of smoke
float like fuzzy donuts up above the city. Spheres and steeples sprout from
bridges and buildings above the tree line. Eddie smells sweet sewage, oil
refineries, factories and steel mills. He smells poverty and waste, opulence
and passion. Eddie soars into this fabulous city where other dandies like him
have their own saloons, where gayblades and kinky babes appreciate Eddie's good
looks and groove to the same alternative beat, thump thump thump.
Other than the price that she will bring, Eddie Plague has little
thought for the shackled woman at the edge of camp. The sooner they rid
themselves of Bitch Bantam the better. Charlie Debunk takes another long drink
of corn and feeds a couple more lead balls to the mouth of his musket. Makes
sense to Charlie: just as each drink makes him feel a little better, the more
gunpowder, lead and wadding he puts into the gun, the bigger hole it will blow.
He rams his ramrod with passion.
Charlie has worked up an intense hankering for poon. Problem is,
Charlie has an intense fear of Eddie Plague. Along with his clean good looks,
Eddie Plague is intensely scary and Charlie does not want to piss him off.
Maybe he should check with his true partner, Skunk Brewster. Maybe Skunk is
wanting some poon too. Maybe together they can get some bitch nookie.
Charlie says to Skunk, "I reckon if we was to hold down
Bitch Bantam jus right we could get us some mighty good puss."
Skunk is smarter than Debunk. He is not as ready to follow his
dick into a danger zone. He is not as likely to forget why this woman is worth
more than any ten of the women they have sold in the past. Skunk does, however,
agree with Charlie: Bitch Bantam would be mighty good poon. Skunk needs to give
the situation some thought. "Hand me that there juga bugjuice," he
tells Charlie. "I need to think." Skunk furrows his brow as though
thinking hurts his head.
Unlike Eddie Plague, Skunk and Charlie are caked with filth.
Charlie passes the jug and Skunk drinks a dizzying gulp. Charlie crams another
load into his rifle. Skunk takes another drink and eyeballs the woman. She
glares back from behind a jungle of ash-blonde hair, her eyes, through the
tangled vines, opaque violet, firing blank rounds of antipathy.
Bitch Bantam has thus far spent her relatively short life in
iffy, but still legal, servitude to others. Born nameless and fatherless in
Joplin, Missouri, Bitch had been dumped by her mother and found by an
enterprising gambler named Dicey Deucey. Normally Dicey would never have
bothered with a two-year-old garbage-heap orphan, but Bitch was special.
Dicey found the thirty-pound tot already so toughened by life
that she sat gurgling and cooing amid a pile of savagely exterminated and
partially eaten terrier-sized rats. The kid had a talent for killing.
Dicey Deucey took Bitch under his wing and went to work, setting
her up as the first ever pit-bitch. Initially he pitted her against as many as
ten rats at a time, drawing such enormous crowds that soon, along with the
wagering, he began to charge admission. As Bitch grew, she graduated from rats
to cocks (thus the name Bantam) to pit-bulls and wild hogs.
At twelve years of age, Bitch was five-nine, one hundred and
fifty pounds. Her baby teeth had been replaced with a set of permanent choppers
Dicey had filed to sharp fang-like points. Her fingernails were long and hard
and sharpened like daggers. In a pit against anything short of a grizzly bear,
Bitch was likely to bring even money.
The thing Dicey Deucey never figured was that Bitch was not just
a dumb woman; she was smarter than he and she held no loyalties to a man who
would lash her with a horse whip, kick her like a dog and call her a worthless
skank. The thing that always puzzled Bitch was the surprised look on Dicey's
face when she leapt from the bloody guts of a dead Arkansas razorback to
ringside, where she ripped out Dicey's throat with her teeth and nails. Dicey
Deucey looked at her as though his best friend had turned on him. He had
expected eternal gratitude for his guidance and care. Dicey earned his violent
death and was too oblivious to know it before taking his final breath.
Afterward Bitch ran from the crowd, hoping to hide away in the
woods, make her way to another town where no one knew who she was.
Unfortunately, her escape brought hysteria to the townsfolk, as though a full-moon
werewolf was stalking their young.
The local sheriff, along with a gun-toting posse and a kennel of
hysterical hounds, hunted her down, chained her and put her in a cage. The
sheriff was a law-abiding entrepreneur; slavery had been abolished yet he found
legal ways to hawk feminine wiles to a buyer's market.
It took seven of the sheriff's men to hold Bitch down and force
her hand to sign an X to a contract. The agreement was a ditto of the forms the
sheriff used in his China-girl whorehouses. The girls were employed at a dollar
a day. They agreed, unknowingly, to pay back a week's wages for every day they
were sick. A woman's nature is to bleed a few days each month and this,
according to the contract, was classified as an illness keeping them from work.
The girls were thus indentured by debt for life, which mercifully was usually
short.
Now Bitch Bantam is twenty-years-old. She has grown six-feet
high. She is hard, cut like a superhero. She conceals great pulchritude beneath
a curtain of dirt and animosity. The contract means nothing to her. But still
she is chained, when not center ring, and sold and traded time and time again.
She is legally the property of Skunk Brewster, Charlie Debunk, and Eddie Plague
who keep the nine-year-old contract, with Bitch Bantam's squiggly X, folded up
in an oilcloth haversack along with their pouch of gold nuggets and Bitch's
clothes.
Bitch is accustomed to indignity but these three shitheads are
the worst yet. Skunk, Charlie, and Eddie have clubbed her, stripped her of
clothing and dragged her chained and naked halfway across America. Much of her
time is whiled away with castle-in-the-sky fantasies. At this moment, however,
Bitch Bantam is plotting escape, murder, freedom.
Charlie Debunk stands, torques his skinny frame and points his
musket at Bitch. Bitch knows what Charlie wants. All she has to do is get him
close enough to grab. Chains or no chains once she puts a grip on Charlie
Debunk he will never buy or sell another woman. Bitch sits butt on heels, balls
of her bare feet in the dirt. She opens her legs to Charlie.
"Looky there, Skunk," Charlie says. "The Bitch is
in heat."
Skunk is not so sure. "I ain't so sure. I doan think we
oughta be gettin too close. I think meybe we oughta club her down a little
first."
Charlie takes a couple of baby steps toward Bitch. "Hell's
bells, Skunk. We club her first, she woan do no humpin."
Bitch is shackled, at the wrists and ankles, with maybe two feet
of play in the heavy chains. She begins to growl deep in the back of her throat.
Eddie Plague is getting irritated, distracted by his imbecile
partners and their penis-motivated hijinks. Eddie is tall and muscular, his
face is symmetrical and his nose is perfect. Eddie is a literate sociopath with
homicidal tendencies and a loud whisper voice. He packs a cutthroat razor and a
two-shot derringer in his polished boots. He carries a bottle of patchouli oil
with which he douses himself two or three times a day. His pants' pockets are
filled with peppermint drops which he sucks nonstop. He wears a black slouch
hat with a low brim that grays his hypnotic blue eyes with shadow.
Unlike his idiot partners, Eddie is only eighteen. Skunk and
Charlie have been slavery vendors since back when it was legal. Eddie entered
the flesh trade as a barefoot preteen selling suck jobs to a trail of horny
yokels expanding westward. Soon he added gigolo to his résumé then pimp and
from there built a stable where he sold and bartered in fine quality boys and
girls. But Eddie wanted more culture and so teamed with Skunk and Charlie as a
means to travel east to BigCity. Now, he just wants to get back on the road. He
wants his partners to leave the woman alone. Bitch Bantam could dispose of
Charlie and Skunk with a well-placed bite. Yet, these idiot associates are risking
life and limb for a space between her legs. Eddie would like to kill Bitch
Bantam, Charlie Debunk, and Skunk Brewster, but that is not what he does.
"Leave the woman alone," Eddie demands. "If you
don't, I'll shoot her dead. Get your things together. It's time to go."
Skunk hasn’t slept well since Eddie joined them. Eddie gives
Skunk creepy dreams. Skunk screws up his courage. "Crud sake, Eddie it
ain't nothin personal. Sides, ifn you shoot her we ain't gonna be able to sell
her no more, an ifn I club her we still got our vestment intact. An, me and
Charlie ain't had us no real poon since forever. We ain't ready to go
yet." Skunk is hoping Charlie will back him up.
Charlie's fear of Eddie is also well developed, just not as
developed as his craving for poon. Charlie's peter has gone stiff and he’s
thinking maybe he can poke Bitch while Skunk is clubbing her. That way she will
be jerking around and such. It might make it more better. He takes another
baby-step toward the woman.
Skunk is up now. He and Charlie have silently voted to ignore
Eddie and go for the woman. Skunk removes his rosewood truncheon from under his
canvas bag. He ventures within a few feet of Bitch Bantam.
Bitch knows what is coming. She flexes her body and the tight
iron bracelets cut into her skin. She watches the men, closely.
Skunk takes a quick step forward, swings the club, which bounces
hard across Bitch's shoulder blades. She winces and grabs at the polished
cudgel. Skunk jumps backwards and gives a whoop.
Eddie Plague is disgusted, he doesn’t like his partners, but he
hates Bitch Bantam, hates all women. He wants assurances that she will not
enjoy Skunk and Charlie's assault. Eddie's opinion being that bondage and rape
are enjoyable experiences.
"Give me the club," Eddie tells Skunk.
Skunk grins, shrugs like an idiot and hands the club to Eddie.
Charlie Debunk sets down his musket and begins to unbutton his
grimy pants and long-johns. Eddie readies himself to crack the woman's skull
when he notices that she is no longer looking at him. She’s looking beyond him
up to a hilly crook on the dirt byway. Skunk Brewster, Eddie Plague, and
Charlie Debunk turn together and look up the road at a most unusual sight.
Slab Pettibone and his bear FuzzyWuzzy have materialized from
around the bend. Slab is singing and playing a ukulele. FuzzyWuzzy is dancing
along in a four-footed two-step.
"My Lulu hugged and kissed me,
She wrung my hand and cried,
She said I was the sweetest thing
That ever lived and died."
Slab Pettibone and FuzzyWuzzy stop in the middle of the rutted
road and look down a hundred yards at the three men and the shackled woman.
FuzzyWuzzy stands on his hind legs to his full six-foot height to get a better
look and taste the air.
Technically, FuzzyWuzzy is an American Black Bear, Ursus
Americanus, but FuzzyWuzzy's hair is not black. FuzzyWuzzy is a rare bear, an
Ursus Americanus Kermode, also known as a Ghost Bear. FuzzyWuzzy's fur is
buttermilk yellow.
Slab Pettibone has no legs. Years ago they were cut off,
mid-thigh, a couple of inches above a hungry gangrene monster. FuzzyWuzzy
serves with honor as Slab Pettibone's legs. Slab is harnessed to FuzzyWuzzy's
back, just above FuzzyWuzzy's front shoulder bones. His hair is long and
silver. He has a gentleman's face with a curly triangle of chin hair and a
thick handlebar moustache. He wears a black tuxedo coat with long tails and a
red sombrero hat. When FuzzyWuzzy stands on his hind legs, they look to be nine
feet tall.
FuzzyWuzzy smells the gathering of humans, their scents a cartoon
jet stream of windowsill pie. The woman's bouquet is tastier than the usual
odoriferous stench of homo sapiens, almost like a she-bear. She is naked and in
chains. Before Slab Pettibone, FuzzyWuzzy had been in chains. It is an image
that bristles his scruff and lays back his ears. He curls his lips in
aggravation and issues a low moan from the back of his throat.
Below them, at the campsite, Charlie Debunk and Skunk Brewster
seem frozen in incredulous mouth-breathing stares, as if neither has the brain
power to digest the song and dance team of Slab Pettibone and FuzzyWuzzy the
bear.
Charlie is the first to break the spell. He picks up his musket
and grabs for his flints and powder horn. He puts powder in the firing cup and
two flints under the hammer. Charlie has shot people before and he has shot
animals before. But he has never shot anything like these two. Charlie Debunk
is about to shoot himself the trophy of a lifetime.
Slab Pettibone takes in the scene, the woman in chains, the man
with a club, and the other man with an old-fashioned blunderbuss, pointing at
them. He tweaks FuzzyWuzzy's ears forward, the command to hit the deck.
FuzzyWuzzy irons-out flat like a fluffy beige carpet. Charlie Debunk pulls the
trigger.
The old flintlock's hammer clicks, sparking the flints which
ignites the spoon of gun powder, which lights up the nine loads of powder,
wadding, and lead balls, which explode the barrel, the stock and Charlie
Debunk's head. Charlie's headless corpse lists from side to side. He takes
three rubbery steps like a vaudeville comedian's drunken pantomime then
collapses to the ground.
Skunk Brewster's pants are still at his ankles. His peter has
deflated. He goes for his pistol, a thirty-eight-caliber small-frame automatic
which unfortunately is not loaded. Skunk frantically digs bullets from his
drooping pants' pocket and shoves them into the five-shot cylinder.
Eddie Plague is ahead of the situation. He knows all about Slab
Pettibone and his pet bear, FuzzyWuzzy. They are nothing to run from, just another
ten-cent pulp novelty, white-hat heroes not known to strike the first blow.
Eddie steps back a couple of feet to avoid splatters of Charlie Debunk's blood
and bone-fragments. He’s calculating his cut of Bitch Bantam now that the take
has changed from thirds to fifty-fifty. Eddie forgets for a moment that he has
moved closer to the woman.
Slab Pettibone looks up from FuzzyWuzzy's furry back and assesses
the situation. While it is true that Slab and FuzzyWuzzy never start a fight,
getting shot at is deemed a challenge. Slab gives FuzzyWuzzy a command,
"Go get em, FuzzyWuzzy!" FuzzyWuzzy takes off like a fubsy rocket.
Slab holds onto his hat and yells, "Yaaa hoop hoop hoop yahooey!"
Skunk has two shells loaded and no time for more. The bear/man is
closing in at an alarming rate.
Eddie Plague backs slowly away from the action, closer still to
the pit-fighting woman. Bitch Bantam grabs him by the ankle, pulls him to the
ground and takes a bite, through his cotton twill pants, out of his thigh. He struggles
to hit her with the billy-club. She grabs an arm and an ear and pulls his face
close enough to kiss. She spits his hunk of thigh and tattered pant's fabric in
his face then bites off his nose.
Slab Pettibone and FuzzyWuzzy screech to a standstill in front of
Skunk just as he raises his thirty-eight. FuzzyWuzzy rears back on his hind
feet and roars a challenge into Skunk's face. Skunk turns white. He smells
berries and grub-worms from FuzzyWuzzy's lunch. He attempts to point and shoot
but his hands are shaking out of control.
FuzzyWuzzy has been given the signal for a round of fisticuffs.
With the heel of his right front paw, FuzzyWuzzy rabbit-punches Skunk in the
chest.
Skunk lands hard to the ground. He sees above him an enraged
beast poised for attack. He comes to a rash and irreversible conclusion: death
by a bullet is easier than death by mauling. Skunk Brewster grins up at Slab
and FuzzyWuzzy. He puts the pistol to his head and pulls the trigger. The gun
pops and Skunk drops dead. It is the most peculiar thing Slab Pettibone has
ever seen.
Eddie Plague has used the truncheon to successfully batter his
way free of Bitch Bantam. He is discombobulated and he scuttles onto the road
and keeps going until sometime later when he falls unconscious into the brush.
Slab Pettibone diverts his eyes from the two dead men. Slab hates
when all manners of creatures die, even no-account slave-traders like Skunk
Brewster and Charlie Debunk. Slab is as well embarrassed to look at the naked
woman. He is shy around the opposite sex, they make him nervous. And, this
woman is not only naked, but she’s the most magnificent gal he has ever seen.
She’s near big as FuzzyWuzzy. Slab Pettibone embarrasses himself with his
thoughts. He flushes red behind his whiskered face and his heart thumps his
head. He averts his eyes from everything outside of the back of FuzzyWuzzy's
crown and begins to sing.
"If you monkey with my Lulu gal
I'll tell you what I'll do
I'll carve your heart out with my razor,
I'll shoot you with my pistol, too."
FuzzyWuzzy sways with the song and sings along in a low slow
soulful bellow. He looks at the woman and senses a primitive kinship. He
wonders if she will wrestle with him. FuzzyWuzzy loves to wrestle and this
feral woman is just the right size. He bows and does a do-se-do.
"I seen my Lulu in the springtime
I seen her in the fall
She broke my heart last winter
Said, Good-by, honey, that's all."
Bitch Bantam watches the shy singing legless man and the dancing
bear. She smiles at the bear and cannot remember the last time she smiled at
anyone, man or beast. It feels strange and happy on her face. She spits Eddie
Plague's nose into the dust and wipes his blood from her lips.