SKIMMING THE
GUMBO NUCLEAR "Facilis Descensus Averni" Chapter Fifteen He ate more canned chili, a repast not coming back up as the bourbon swilled inside him. The projects still seemed like a holy city. He watched Fellini's 8 1/2" and once again attacked the Playboys which had become his children. Elward with catfish mustache, truck driver extraordinary, had said something about Zombies and nests. His wayward routes through Ciba Geigy, Elward was worried about contracting cancer. During a break late that night, on the national news, Ricky Harrison blurrily saw Dan Rather and Brokaw both comment on different networks about the unusual cancer rates. Bote attributed unsubstantially by Chemical leaks mixed with radiation leaks. The radiation was unconfirmed. So the nation was getting involved even moreso.
Chapter Sixteen At the nuclear plant Toolroom and Shorty came on shift for the night. "Don't break out them screw books just yet, you pig-eyed sack of crud!," Toolroom told Shorty. "Why not?" "Cause it looks like we got us a problem." Mother of God, Toolroom thought. "What's coming out in the scheduled entries on the computer?" Shorty asked. "It says things are getting too hot." He tried to beep the big men, D/P managers and the assistant manager. "Sir," Toolroom said in the receiver. "We got us a potential leak if the temperature don't go down" He continued. "I'm trying to halt load now. The gauges all say that it's in a danger zone, but the efficiency and Threshold, and throughput all are trying to not go down . . . stay up . . ." He was starting to stutter. "I tried that." "Yes, sir." "Son of a screwing bitch." Toolroom said as he hung up. "It might leak just a little bit." "Fawck!" Shorty echoed. They diddled knobs. Men came in from the other areas. Engineers. Computer technicians. A few disk drives had gone out and a gauge wasn't telling the truth. Outside the faces of the concrete terminal island nuclear piles were sweating like fat ladies in satin skirts. "We got it under control," Crippen the wimp engineering genius told the Unisys computer technicians, all four of them. One replaced the drive. One turned the AC up in the room, Another digital technician was testing that meat magazine. Some other bosses stopped out in the doorway. Muttering. Cursing. Really not anxious anymore. Just a few roentgens had gotten through. No big deal, considering what had happened last week. The DEQ boys would let it slide. It hadn't gotten out of the immediate area. The science wonder boys took that to the bank. If this crud kept up, Toolroom thought, we are gonna explode one day. Fly to the fuggin moon!, like a nuclear space shovel or shuttle or whatever it were called. He thought about his wife and daughters. Sheeit! Time to maybe get into another line a' work. Maybe go back to being a toolpusher doing turnarounds at Dow Chemical. Sheeit! He winced again at the nightmarish pressure being put on him. They wouldn't determine whose fault this was for a couple a weeks. Crud, he was in for an ingrade raise next month. This would set his skinny tubercular arse back to fuggin Springfield again, plowing rotten dirt and eating Mule farts behind a backhoe plow and the ass end of a jack-ass. At the campus standing like hotels stood the twin towers of the Biochemistry and chemistry buildings. By the Plato-looking professors in bum clothes, the ragged hair, bearded and minds a million miles away, one knew one was in the confines of a freethinking place. Kendra had just come from her apartment after another argument with Chuck the doctor over some goddamn curtain rods. Juan examined a Playgirl magazine while eating his chili-dog from hell and sticking some mushy fries in his mouth. Before it had been a macrobiotic diet, stir fried vegetables. But he had fought with his lover, Paul. Juan checked the loins and buttocks in flashes of admonition with every turn of the page. A blonde buncake hunk was equipped for life and standing by a rock on a beach with everything tanned. Even his naughty bits, which weren't so itty-bitty. Kendra snuck behind him. She would have put her hands around his eyes and said guess who in that sultry voice like Lauren Bacall. But that argument with the doctor who liked to do nothing but watch golf, play golf, attend golf workshops. Once in a while attend to Kendra's sexual needs while the Master's tournament was going in the background. Climax and moans and Chuck had looked up right when he should have been attending to her, that face pouty and full of blood, red cheeks and a smile. She had that sinister device of being swayed by charm, money and power. Yuppie pond scum in medical frocks had tanned her bottom brown as a nut in Destin Florida, Bermuda, St. Thomas and the Virgin Islands. Atop diving boards of swimming parties behind blistered doors in the French Quarter. Juan had taken her behind those, where courtyards would be festooned with handsome gay men from France, and Rio. Her mane of blonde hair, and those looks of Hellenic proportion that would make the Ford modeling agency shed a tear, not to mention Aeschylus at her olympian heroics. And here she was in her formaldehyde scent reeking through the Obsession Calvin Klein. An eel-thing still alive in a cage. She had been dissecting one in the next room where the live one had teeth like Lon Chaney. Kendra made notes on it. Its capacity to function better in the colony from field study. There were biologists over at the Exxon docks watching the glowing things slither all over each other. The nest of eggs hatched out tiny reptilish mewing babies. Another nest was found in the Atchafalaya swamp under a knotted undergrowth of cypress. One discovery was made by Kendra. The eel-things had venom which would be released upon biting the victim. They had analyzed the venom and found it similar to water moccasin's venom. They tested it on lab rats. How it fit into the overall scheme and if it was an entirely new strain of poison was yet to be determined. Juan moped when Kendra came behind him. She pointed to the engorged member of the nude bronze buncake in the Playgirl and Juan laughed. "That is my new lover! Unless I let him sleep with you for a while! Tee hee, he laughed, his Tyrone Power eyes twinkling. She could tell something was wrong. "Don't tell me sweetie! Paul is cheating on you?" She put her two fingers on his bearded smooth face into a grin. He finally smiled. "Oh, my darling," Juan said. "I am going to go to the Parade bar in the Quarter and find a little blond and lock him up for all weekend!" She laughed. "I know some guys who are hunks. Unfortunately, all of them are hetero!" Poor baby pouted with blue crystalline eyes. "I will find my hunk and make love to him well!" He muttered some Portuguese fugacities at Paul now off to Aspen with some boytoys on a free all expenses paid trip with a video production company. Paul wrote blurbs and as campaigns and was really quite active in his frivolities. That displeased a more sexually conservative Juan. But Kendra could hardly pace herself with Juan's wild excursions he would spend hours telling her about. "Paul is in Aspen, screwing Jack Nicholson probably!" "Well, I'll make love to you then" "My darling. You reek of formaldehyde and guts. I cannot be around you unless you put on your miniskirt and smell like a french cathouse!" "You would rather be in a turkish bath." He smiled finally. She had cheered him up. "Well, cutie, I gotta go finish my notes and eat my sushi." "How can you eat dat stuff?" He gestured his masculine arms (he was built like a woman's dream) at the pans and petri dishes with culture samples, and serum jars, and fluid dispensers. "This is a take out from the sushi bar on College drive. Sushi with lots of ginger to get loaded on." She had gone into detail about how lots of ginger paste would make her hallucinate. A juvvy woman. She ate the sushi. It was proper as it got chewed by her gorgeous teeth and those lips embossed with pink lipstick. She wondered what the eel monstrosity would taste if pickled and eaten with fortified warm rice wine, Sake. Not too good. She knew the tissues of the specimen twitching in the petri dish as a steel pick pithed in its head. A large mean one, shrieking like a monster. Its head bobbed with the spike in its bulbous head. Now a stream of green fluid flowed from the puncture. Kendra calmly finished the last of the sushi. The taste didn't mix well with the formaldehyde. Juan stood there as she grabbed a hunk of ginger and sensuously put it in her mouth. "My darling, you almost turn me on with your finger full of that pink ginger dabbing in your mouth." "Let's get back to the subject at hand." She couldn't keep from laughing as she said it. Juan looked grimacingly at the dying specimen. It seemed to not want to die. Its little brain, (which was classically tiny) was lobotomized. It shrieked one last time and then bared its teeth and a little whistle. Then the twitching ugly bodice shrugged around the metal tray. The dorsal fin closed and then it lay still. "Its's dead. It's weird. It whistles. Like an altogether different species. It does have traces of radioactive tissue. Look at the underbelly." Juan lifted the tail. "It's a female. There are signs of mutation and distortion on two out of three of these things. "Tell me something I don't know, dearie," Juan said as he put the tail down and it flopped. "Time to discover more secrets of this thing . . ," Kendra said. "Well, it is all yours, little bambino. All I know is that it is as big around as a certain organ of a football player I seduced once a few years ago . . ." "Which one?" "I'm not telling, but he was almost all-American." "Damn!" Kendra thought about going to some social parties. She always had to turn them down because of Chuck, the doctor from hell. Something would have to be done about their relationship. She thought for a minute about it. Juan left after blowing her a kiss from his handsome latino face of a matador. She began delving and cutting away, and identifying egg sacs, and such, and stayed there late, in that dark night. She thought as she began to leave after several hours, something ominous and dreadful was going to happen. These things were capable of being carriers of plague-like diseases. And she wasn't sure exactly what strains of viruses these things possessed.
Chapter Seventeen Elward drove through the gates of the River Bend nuclear plant. The radium piles and vast cooling towers looked like huge roman structures or wheat silos and were pendulous in size. The white alabaster steaks and lines of connecting steel rod and concrete and specially treated material and steel was awesome. Angola Penitentiary was down several miles; the largest prison in the South. Elward didn't like to think about that either. He grabbed the stickshift coming out of the floor in the standard-H and downshifted over the speed bumps as the guard let him through. He could just imagine in the boiling sun brutally beating down on everything that he could smell the radiation leaking. "Crud" he sounded through the respirator. Osha rules. Plant rules. Nuclear fallout all around him, he envisioned. Give them their lousy mofoking wire and plastibond pipe and he'll get his ass away from round here. The security guards were lollygagging round, amidst the beautiful structure. It was almost a modern art masterpiece. Through carefully cultivated lawns, Elward saw amidst the parking lots full of cars, his packing-slip Jimbob and the loading dock freight gate. He redlined the truck at 15 miles-an-hour in his earnest anxiety to get the hell through this. The sky was swirling like an art picture at a Catholic Easter fair. The clouds were funnelled like a nimbus kaleidoscope beneath the veneer of the magical golden garden of wonderment. Here comes Elward, catfish mustache of hairs blonde, orange, yellow and brown on his upper lip. He didn't have the sense to shave the damned thing off and stop looking like a catfish in the bottom of Lake Bornge. There came Jimmy the freight man. The man whom he could give the stuff to while the gamma rays hit him invisibly. He could smell 'em, he could feel 'em. They were piercing him, x-raying his insides. He ought to talk to Pokey about given this screwin' route to somebody else, like Rayhound! Hell, Rayhound thinks he can get off on radiation rays, probably. Black man, you's a fool! Black man, you crazy. Give Jimmy the glowing man the fuggin plastibond pipe and . . . Crud they'll probably have to use the forklift for the pipe! Crud! Man. He parked. He motioned to the white boy in the silver suit. Come and get dis here plastic bond pipe before I shove it up your ass. "What 's going on, dude?" the silver suited surfer mutant said. Blonde with dat California accent. "Hey, how you dooin?" Elward said, fiercely hiding his displeasure at the extended wait. "Forklift coming?" Okay. Thank God in Heaven. They got it down and Elward talked to Jimmy. "Any more weird rumors about dis here place?" "What do you mean?" "Bout monsters, mutant people, eels, fishes, deer . . ." "No." "Come on." Elward said. "I can't even stand to be here for a li'l while, padnah." "Sheitt man," Jimmy said . . ." He (pointing to the silver dude) said he saw things in Devil's swamp (landfill) like oozing green waste and stuff sloppin' around it." "What about zombies.?" "Zombies?" "Yeah," Elward said, sucking on his proud makeshift mustache. "All we got is some workers home sick with radiation poisoning. They were in an unauthorized area. Got caught smoking weed under the radium piles. Said they could got kilt." "Ma-an!" Some people just stupid!" The sky continued to give the warning in it's orange red fleeciness. Sailor take warning! Heed the zombies. "Man I gotta go. Y'all be good now!" Elward crashed through the gate practically, but the dude in the post had Pink Floyds THE WALL crescendoing through his nether head. All the melancholia and despair of the work ethic; the sadness of this century. Nuclear plants are an abomination, Elward had been told by black minister fellah, Bobby MaGee. He been trying to preach and he used to admit he bought more weed enough to pay for a Cadillac. But he was saved now. Elward was getting married soon. Gonna pay the notes on that house in White Castle, right on River Road. No cancer down there, he thought.
Chapter Eighteen After the work ethic was laid aside it was the cool air of the evening wafting through the open door pushing staleness aside also. The air was being attacked and infiltrated throughout by Rimsky Korsakov's "The Golden Cockerel." The melodious eastern thematic sounds chorded around Ricky Harrison. His Bourbon and Seven was cocked sideways as he was wont to do when imbibing; that miracle of not spilling a drop. But the television was miraculously not whirling some sophisticated video but the local news was pervading the torrents of stereophonic discord. He abruptly turned the stereo off as the grotesquely handsome newsman plowed along: "The Biochemical research facility at LSU has found a startling new turn to the new specie of fish-reptiles found in the Atchafalaya Swamp and Devil's Swamp. (a picture of the ghoulish thing drawn and colored in background) They have been known for quite some time to be poisonous." He went on. "Dr. Plaisance of the faculty of LSU medical school, what is the exact nature of the problem?" "What we are looking at here are nests in various locales. Primarily believed to be a offshoot of the common alligator gar of fresh water variety. But this particular strain is venomous and a cure had not been made readily available at this moment. We have dissected these and they did have traces of radiation in some. Especially the nest underneath the docks at Exxon shipyards near Devil's swamps." "So if on were bitten by one it could be fatal, Doctor?' "Precisely." They went on for a few minutes detailing the anatomical nature, the origin. All pseudo guesswork. Not an inkling, thought Ricky Harrison, of late at Lamplighter apartments with bourbon in hand. Lethal does in innards, and running low on ice. The ravioli cans lay around like vestibule icons. In the land of nowhere he thought about the buzz of gossip going round. Nationwide news now. Rumors of plagues. He caught the last tidbit of information. "We think these and other similar creatures are responsible for disease and spread thereof disease through the Baton Rouge parish (east and west)." My god! Pestilence by the throng! Plagues like Camus's own. Almond trees with disinfecting of the dying city. Venice, New York all rotted to the core. New Orleans, french quarter smelling like defiling of rotted graves. Now the town with refineries built all round, surrounding the people. Even in the manicured suburbs, the city was toppling like Rome did for centuries of rot. "Poisonous, disease spreading. Quarantine now mentioned." These are just the preliminaries. The blackness of the night silenced the distant shrieking of goblins and stygian caves forlorn! Here are sights and sounds unholy! Whistling steam pipes. Baring of gnashing teeth like Reverend Jenkin's prophecies gone amuck. He would play it to the hilt. Soothsayer of the working class North Baton Rouge scumbags, the yuppie road-killers, and the suburban trash.
Chapters 19 thru 22 will be up on May 1st. Visit M.F. Korn's web site, April 1999 HofP |