The Spy's Little Zonbi (3 page)

***

Chase focused on the road, trying to keep the crappy debates he'd been forced to endure from harshing his buzz. His journalism professor, a man who claimed not to own a tie but whose flowing beard would cover most of it anyway, was ready to sign off on the fifteen credits of work study in Haiti. The department chair, however, wasn't having any of it. Doctor Wrinkled Bitch had grave concerns with regard to rewarding students for incomplete work. The fact that the school had tossed wads of cash at a bogus charity for god knows how many years wasn't much of an issue. The fact that Chase and Stoney had nearly been shot to pieces was discussed with the same casualness as their lunch order.

Stoney had been little help during the two tedious meetings in the crammed office. Both times he'd burst through the door wreaking like old bong water and beer, causing Doctor Wrinkle Bitch to bury her nose in a hanky. Both times he'd fallen asleep right before it was his turn to speak. Startled awake, he'd excused himself, fleeing the room for the toilet down the hall.

“
It's going around,” Chase said weakly, but he knew it was probably for the best after seeing the cartoonish drawing Stoney planned to enter as evidence. It had stick-figure soldiers shooting guns at stick-figure children and was captioned with words like
bang
,
ouch
, and
help me
.

Chase had dreaded walking inside that room, too. The flight of stairs had been a mountain climb. The carpeted hallway was quicksand. He'd wanted to turn and run downhill, but he had no place to go. He'd practiced calling home to announce he was quitting school, but only when he was good and drunk. He'd even held a beer bottle to his ear because he was too chicken shit to get that close to a real phone. Not with that sort of news.

Chase had become the Golden Child of his family after their dad had caught his older sister Amanda diddling the dog. “A violation of nature,” was how the former U.S. Army Staff Sergeant and current plant foreman described the incident to his wife.

If he only knew.

Chase was eleven when he'd woken in the dead of night to Amanda pressing the barrel of one of their father's guns to the center of his forehead. He'd looked up at her cross-eyed at first, the glow from a Flintstones night light enough for him to take stock of his circumstances. With great stealth, she'd mounted his chest, straddled him in his sleep, and with her left hand pressed the cold and impossibly hard metal of the .45-Caliber revolver to within millimeters of his brain. Her other hand had been shoved down inside her white panties, which were decorated with little blue dancing hippos in skirts. That hand, just inches above his belly button, had been making small circles he vaguely understood to be a girl's version of jerking off. Frozen in fear of his lunatic sibling, he could feel the circular motion of her right hand transferring all the way up through the barrel of the gun. He'd wanted to cry because he was so scared and because she was so sick.

Maybe because of the long strand of drool reaching for him from the corner of her pursed lips, he had been certain she was going to eat him.

But after she'd finished, she'd pulled the gun away and leaned down to bestow a quick, sisterly kiss on the bulls-eye mark the gun had left. She brushed away the spittle and disappeared from his room.

Chase had tried falling asleep as fast as possible to escape.

By the time he'd entered high school and Amanda had been caught violating their German Sheppard, she had made her own escape to Upstate New York with a woman she'd described as her Venetian Love Goddess. The family knew her general whereabouts from the postmarks on the homemade pornographic postcards that would arrive in their mailbox. The Post Office would intercept some and they'd be delivered in official-looking brown envelopes also containing dire-sounding form letters regarding federal mail crimes. But more often than not, the five-by-seven inch close-up photos she'd lovingly and carefully mounted on white cardboard would arrive directly. The slightly out of focus images of what appeared to be her vagina filled with things you'd find around the house on the front; little hand written notes on the back.

“
Wish you were here!” and “Thinking of you!”

The mostly out of focus pictures could have been of the Grand Canyon, or maybe Fidel Castro's beard. A stainless putty knife protruded in one, a battery operated stud finder in another. She and her Venetian Love Goddess might have been doing home renovations.

Chase could not go home a failure. Maybe it would have finally killed his father. More likely, his father would have killed him. He had no choice but to ascend the stairs and brave the precarious hallway to beg for his credits.

***

“
Can we stop?”

The sharp female voice in Chase's ear nearly made him crash into a camo-painted pickup they were flying past at eighty miles per hour. He eased off the gas pedal.

“
I really have to pee.” The bikini girl reinserted her breast into the flag top.

“
We're almost in Salisbury.”

“
Cool,” she said, and Chase felt a fingernail run along the back of his neck in an elliptical pattern. “You know who you look like?”

Chase shook his head. He couldn't see her in the mirror, just felt that sliver of a touch.

“
If you had round glasses and cooler hair, you'd look like John Lennon,” she said, and then her fingernail was gone.

Near the middle of the last leg of their journey Chase stopped at the 7-Eleven where he found the local newspaper. He opened the crisp edition and spread it on top of all the other bigger papers, which included
The
Post
,
The
Sun
, and
The
Inquirer
. Each were huge and important papers carrying news from their grand and considerable cities, as well as from around the world.
The Daily Times
was skinny by comparison—skeletal, actually. But Chase sensed every front page story was important to the people in these parts, from grain prices to a new parking meter proposal. Inside
The
Times
was a section listing who was expected to have dinner at a neighbor's house, right next to a grainy photo of a migrant worker wanted in connection with a shooting. Chase had learned in class how a newspaper was supposed to hold a mirror up to its community. And here was a perfect mirror, however thin and irrelevant it might seem to outsiders.

These weren't stories about egocentric professors who held the ultimate power of grades over frightened eighteen-year-olds. Narcissistic, bullshit-laden blathering about recent sabbaticals to their homeland or wherever. These were real human beings, real people. This was real life. And on the front of the second section was a picture of an old man in even older clothes. In glorious black and white he was kneeling on wet grass, with long wild hair, and his tears were caught by the camera streaming down his face. In his bony arms were three dead cats he'd apparently scooped up for the photographer. There had just been a fire and these were the victims. They were his only family, the caption explained.

Chase refolded the paper and dropped the twenty-five cent issue on the counter with the rest of his drink and candy bar breakfast order, while his passengers climbed over the car doors. It was hard not to watch the girl in the tiny bikini pull off this gymnastic move, not the least bit modest, with an unchecked wedgie exposing most of her lovely rear end.

The clerk, who was observing Stoney tickle the writhing girl just outside the big glass storefront, was having a hard time making change with his ancient black fingers.

“
Daz one fine use of Ole Glory,” the man said under his breath, his yellow eyes flashing.

“
Can you give me directions?” Chase pointed at the newspaper.

Climbing behind the hard plastic steering wheel, Chase was careful not to spill his gigantic cup of raspberry slush.

“
I wanna check something out,” he told his passengers, but they were oblivious, again busy groping and slurping one another. The
Times
was just two quick right turns off the highway, according to the clerk, and he wanted a fast look before heading back toward the ocean. Among the sandy towels and boogie boards in the trunk was a batch of cover letters, a few résumés, and sets of student newspaper clippings left over from his summer internship applications. Why not hit this place?

After three years of covering the who, what, where, when, how, and whys of grade-cheating scandals and anti-Iran marches on the Capital, Chase had been rejected by all the big-time papers and attracted only the mild interest of crappy little rags that wouldn't do much for a post-graduation résumé. The crappy rags were just looking for convenient ways to get coverage while their regular reporters were on vacation during the typically slow summer months in non-resort towns.

The Daily Times
' lot was nearly full of reporters and photographers meeting deadlines, as Chase backed into a visitor's spot to sit comfortably and get a good look at the heartbeat of the town. Stoney and the pretty girl continued their softcore sex acts. It sounded like someone was eating a ripe peach behind Chase's head.

The sprawling one-story brick building was squat and ugly under the glare of the hot sun, and yet Chase's stomach churned with envy as an old blue Honda Accord sped into the lot on squealing bald tires. There was an awful, metal-on-pavement thud as it bottomed out, screeching to a halt in the last open spot directly in front of the employee entrance. The thirty-something-year-old guy jumped out of the driver's seat and raced to the building, fumbling with a set of keys, the car door banging open on its hinges and slamming shut behind him. Chase saw the yellow pencil behind one ear and in the back left pocket of his corduroy pants the narrow white reporters' notebook, curved from being sat upon for the hurried ride to make this deadline. Chase had burned through dozens of the same brand of notebook for the school paper, not one filled with anything of real consequence.

Seconds later, the scene was over. The heavy door slammed behind the harried reporter, leaving only the ticking sound of his cooling Honda.

Had there been a fire? Was he coming from the courthouse where a murderer had been brought in for a first appearance? Were the words scribbled in his notebook less than an hour away from becoming some huge banner headline announcing a suspect arrested for a string of sexual assaults? Chase's hands were cramped from clenching his own grooved steering wheel.

“
Wow.” He relaxed his grip and looked up into the rearview mirror, where Stoney had his right hand casually cupped under the girl's bikini top. She'd turned her face up to catch the rays, a small bead of sweat drawing a line from one temple, oblivious or not caring who saw her getting felt up in the back of a convertible.

“
That dude really had to take a dump,” Stoney announced, struggling with a pack of matches to light a joint one-handed.

“
Yeah, maybe.” Chase climbed out to rummage through the trunk for his résumé. His heart was pounding.

T
here was a coin flip that decided an awful lot.

The quarter spun through the haze of bong smoke, parting the molecules with ease, then clacked off the ceiling and was lost among the empty beer bottles and dirty laundry that had overrun every square inch of floor space.

“
Shit,” Chase said, blinking hard to try and clear his vision.

Stoney laughed, flicked the Bic lighter, and added more pot smoke to the blue haze in the second floor dorm room.

“
You dumbass,” Stoney said, then choked back another hit, spiraling tendrils of smoke rising from the corners of his mouth and out his nose. Chase thought Stoney looked like a curly haired blond wizard when that happened. Not the Wizard of Oz kind of wizard, but the Merlin Gandolf Frodo Baggins kind.

Chase's brain was as foggy as the room. He was a bobble head doll with gigantic cheeks that he touched with his warm fingers. He needed to shave at some point and would kill for a bag of Fritos with their salty, crunchy goodness, oh, my. The cafeteria was closed, but there was a vending machine in the student center. If only he had a quarter.

“
I need to find a quarter.”

“
You lost your quarter.” Stoney pointed at the ceiling and Chase followed the wobbly finger down to the mess on the floor.

Yes, right, there was a quarter down there, he thought, surveying the immediate area for some silvery glint off Washington's face or an eagle's chest. The bits of trash and colored dirty clothing—combined with a dozen or so bong hits—made the floor a kaleidoscope of amazing textures and earthy hues.

“
I have to focus.” Chase rubbed his face, then swallowed a shot of some harsh, clear alcohol his roommate shoved toward him. “This is really freaking important. This is my future.”

Stoney handed him the bong with its bowl packed tight. He flicked the lighter.

“
Okay, last one.” Chase prepared by shaking his upper body and taking a few deep breaths.

“
Heads,” Chase was accepting the summer journalism internship the
Salisbury Daily Times
had offered; “tales,” he was applying for a lifeguard job at a local community pool to work, party, and scam on bikini-clad girls until fall semester. David Eugene “Stoney” Steinmetz, his roommate for nearly three chaotic and often stoned years, was his connection for the lifeguard job. Stoney had miraculously risen through the ranks of lifeguard hierarchy, charged with training new guards and keeping children and adults safe for the last two summers, despite spending much of the time quietly sleeping in his perched chair behind mirrored sunglasses and an oversized umbrella. He'd fallen out of his chair at least a half dozen times, right onto the concrete deck. Luckily, he was always still drunk enough not to get hurt trying to break his fall.