SKIMMING THE GUMBO NUCLEAR
By M.F. Korn
Chapters 23 thru 25

"Facilis Descensus Averni"

Chapter Twenty Three

He awoke like Lazarus dreaming of disinfected Bourbon Street. Displacing himself in trances bromide-induced , Bourbon forget-me-nots, until his sinuses came slamming down on him. Today was the day he would attend the barbecue of the savages.

The brothers were on their way, he thought. He cleansed himself, excising an emulsion of liquor and dirt and semen. He felt the nuzzled beams of water shove into his mouth ridding him oral fixations. Lately of drinking as much liquor as possible in a wayward tendency. He knew there would be plenty of grog at the barbecue. Quoting Lord Byron to the infidels, the wogs. What a racist. These men he knew were probably better men than he was. They were on their way.

Knock, knock upon his chamber door. Evermore. He rejoiced in that funk of alcohol, expunged remnants. He rejoiced that he could just have that Saturday and drink and most probably get high with the brothers. Though wog-hemp didn't make him anything but paranoid.

"Open dis door, boy!" Mike Green yelled. It was Mike Green, Joe Taylor's eternal booger boy, his righteous college roommate, who had in hand Five Alive Juice and a bottle of Thunderbird.

"What's going on man?" he said, turning on the TV. "Da Herculoids is on. I like Tanna and Sheera, and the Herculoids better dan Space Ghost."

"Where the hell is Joe Taylor and Rayhound?"

"Rayhound going wid his lady. He'll meet us there." That creole gentleness; the man was a saint as a brother. Nice fellah. Ricky would say that Mike Green, drinking Five Alive and Thunderbird, watching the Herculoids, was a nice fellah.

"Man, look at all these tapes!"

Ricky laughed. He put a shirt on over his Sonny Tuft's chest of the damned. Male sensation of 1945.

"Man, Mike, I'm hung over like a bear!"

"Take a sip man." Mike sat up in the easy chair and gave Ricky that bottle. It beckoned him to tap into its greenish fruity backwash. He took a swig that Thor, God of Thunder would have choked back.

"See if dat don't make you feel good in about one minute." "Hair o de dog."

There was this whole world out there, beyond manicured suburbs. Here were men of color. They didn't need Lord Byron scolded to them. They carved it all out for themselves.

Mike Green stretched and sprawled out in the easy chair waiting for Joe Taylor. Watching the Herculoids, with dinosaurs and a gob of protoplasm called bleep who went "HHHHHHHHMMMMMM," Hanna Barbera didn't know that huge creole behemoths liked their cartoons. A sereneness, an unashamed belief in the justice of cartoon. That the good prevailed, good over evil. And the brothers were essentially good. It wasn't like Mrs. Harrison had told him when he had started to make friends at construction sites . . . criminals, deviants, thugs. No sir! These were gentlemen, who liked Thunderbird and the Herculoids.

"I like that blob, Bleep. He's able to turn into shapes of stuff like pillows or nets, or rope or anything. And he's always riding on the shoulder of the ape. Tanna was in trouble . And Bleep saved the day." The television showed brilliance, radiant animation of Hanna Barbera.

"Yeah, I like Bleep too," Ricky added. It was a good day. "That Joe Taylor better get his black ass over here. Dey gonna start that screwin' barbecue without us."

Ricky was feeling the goodness of fermented wine, fortified and now edified. He was slowly becoming Norman Mailer's "White Black man."

A man who could learn from these men of color, these unsavages. These men who had more soul. Men who took him in as one of them and invited him over to the barbecue way down the river road, past the chemistry set of Dow Chemical. How dare Ricky Harrison call it a savage barbecue. He would learn more, too.

"Open the door!" It sounded like Joseph Taylor, who shined as a hoopster at MacNeese.

"Ya keep on knocking but ya can't come in!" Mike Green sang as he stammered strongly away from the intrigue of "Herculoids" and opened the door.

Ricky Harrison showed his videotapes to both of them.

"Man. Everything is dirty, 'cept for dem videotapes." Fellini's "Amacord" showed for a second upon the Arts and Entertainment channel as Harrison changed stations.

"Come on 'li'l padner. We gotta go." Wallet, yes. Checkbook, yes. Cash, yes. No comb, no "White Black man."

"I wanted to see the rest a' the cartoons man!" Mike Green said with apparent anguish. "Da Herculoids were in trouble again."

"Screw da Herculoids. Come on Jethro. We going'."

"But Tanna and Sheera were trapped by the fly people of Mars . . ," Harrison joked. Mike Green laughed.

"Someday we gotta sit down and have a long talk with dat boy!" Green quipped.

"Come on Lurch," Taylor said, and the fetid odors were stifled from fresh air again.

They hopped in Joe Taylor's old Riviera. His hardtop was peeling away, showing smattering of rust.

"Shotgun," Mike Green called out.

"Jethro, get in back."

"White man in back." Going out with some handsome men of color; this was the immediacy of the hangover cure that frosted Ricky's plight and turned it inside out. That hair of the dog from the Thunderbird was making him feel that rush come alive again. He swigged the last of the Thunderbird. They hauled onto Lobdell towards North Baton Rouge.

"We gotta get some stuff to cook?" Mike asked.

"Yeah, li'l man."

"Who you calling little man. I'll beat your ass!"

"I got some gass . . . ." Joe Taylor lisped with that smile that everyone loved.

"You alright" Mike said, and then laughed like they did in Iberville Parish. They winded up and down streets of ugliness. No one imbibed liquor. No mention of pot, just a couple of gentlemen running the streets. Heading for Plank Road towards the Winn Dixie.

They invaded that Winn Dixie and made way for the sweetmeats section.

"What are we gonna get?"

"Li'l Padnah, we gonna get some hamburger meat, some pork chops, and some sausage."

"Yeah. Gotta get sausage."

"And some finger food."

"What's 'sat?"

"Why you call em that?" Harrison said with fermenting stomach of cheap fortified wine.

"You just pick em up off the griddle and eat 'em. Jethro."

Mike green was manhandling several six packs of beer.

The cute little babe rang it up for the men of all colors.

The Riviera with that curved windshield was full of the boys and beers that were just starting to pop open. They hauled down Airline Highway, all the way to the Old Mississippi Bridge. The one Huey Long built so that Exxon would have to be built in Baton Rouge. And fueling across were a few boys whose destination was somewhere on the other side of the river, where more refineries were. But not today, as far as Harrison was concerned. They were all shut down.

That's when Mike Green busted out the wog hemp. For the wogs, all three of them.

"No man. Y'all aren't gonna smoke that now?"

"Yeah li'l padnah. What'sa matter, you don't smoke weed?" Such an insidious ring to it. Joe Taylor and Mike Green started pulling on the joint. The sickly smell wafted through, and Ricky Harrison suddenly began to enjoy himself. He realized that those frat boys to whom the manor bourn were given every choice in life. Every chance over Joe Taylor and Mike Green, who played college basketball and then were sent to a hero's funeral. Downtrodden, working in a tin warehouse for five or six bucks an hour. College heroes. The other night Joe Taylor told Harrison about the basketball game which might have been on Television. One side was all recent ex-LSU players, the other MacNeese and Southern players. It was going on at the rundown city park gym, played for a measly few handful of folk.

Ricky Harrison decided to go ahead and take a few puffs. A surcease from the anguish. As they barrelled down River Road, after going through Plaquemine, Ricky Harrison had finished two beers already. Mike Green noticed Ricky Harrison was laughing. He had gone hog wild.

"Whew!" Harrison felt it good. Green and Taylor casually sipped their beers and continued to have great width and breadth of souls.

But then it seemed they were going down River Road forever. What was this? The River Road winded next to the levee green. The river high with recent rains; it wasn't exactly the Nile, was it? Even though Allan Quartermain and his two King Solomon's tribesmen were heading down to Catfish-faced Elward's new brick house somewhere the hell down this road. They went past some plantation sights.

"Hey. Historical plantation marker . . ."

"White Castle Plantation."

Green and Joe Taylor weren't thinking about anything in particular. The car was silent. There was no air conditioning and it was hot and it was the South and it was good. But, Ricky was paranoid now from the Mexican devil weed. Cheap black man stash. He looked over at the two men; all three riding up front.

It seemed like they were going down this screwing River Road all the way to the mouth of the Mississippi! In Harrison's mind, was something up? Were they going to kill him? They were going to kill him. Take him down there, stab him or shoot him. Throw him in the undulating river, and . . . well what was he worth?

"Can I ask you two guys one thing?" Harrison asked.

He didn't know if he was serious or not. It was kind of surreal with that beer and wog hemp.

"Are y'all gonna kill me?"

"What?"

"What is taking so long? It's been a hell of a long time. We passed Elward's house."

The two booger boys roared with their souls peeled all the way back. Happy, and stoned, their chinese bandit eyes were full of mirth. Joe Taylor caught on.

"Yeah, li'l padnah. We gonna cut you up and throw ya body in the levee, just a few miles down."

"Yeah. We passed Elward's house a long ways back."

Harrison's decline in general was so bad, his mind so twisted, that he couldn't tell if they were joking or not.

"We gonna shoot ya ass and throw it in a river. We gonna take ya money!" Green said and laughed that creole bellyful. That was the essence of pure happiness.

They continued down the River Road, Harrison's brain trying to heal like Reverend Jenkins himself could lay on his hands and be an instrument of Christ and heal the poor Jethro's brain. Finally Elward's house came up. A nice, white brick new house, just across the River Road where time stood still since the Mesozoic era, from Mark Twain's river.

They parked, Joe Taylor and buddy past the joke of paranoia. They were hungry. Rayhound was there with his woman, and a child, small and cute. Elward was out in the back barbecuing. His newlywed wife clearly wore the pants in the family.

The barbecue was suddenly the most important thing in the known universe. Beer was drank by all the brothers and sisters and the token, Ricky Harrison. What reverse situations! How fantastic! Ricky Harrison talked with Rayhound. Bobby Magee was not present; he had a church function. Elward was talkin shop as usual.

"Y'all smoked it up?" he asked first though.

"Huh."

"Oh Man." he emphasized. Those ribs looked awfully good. Elward checked out the goods. The meats included hotdogs. The steak was Elward's. Rayhound had brought some pork chops. The gospel bird was perched on there sizzling away, the fat spitting into the brimstone.

Ricky Harrison was stoned in front of the brothers. What would the Brothers of the Sacred Heart think?

"You got ya boy stoned," Elward said wittily. Rayhound burst out laughing and started that muscular disorder two-step again, the cakewalk from disco hell. "Yeah man, ohhhhh man," like a spiritual chant in a cane field. Rayhound did Isadora Duncan proud, like he was the Nicholas Brothers or Sammy, Jr. Ricky Harrison was kind of blushing. Then the subject finally turned to the inevitable.

"I'm telling you something's going down."

"What you mean?" Taylor asked. Looking down the hot asphalt to the levee and the pecan trees in the grove across the street. Looking for a hoop. Basketball was in his mind always.

"River Bend." Elward said. A great worry crossed his brow and he sucked in his lower lip. His reddish hair shined in the still air. As Mike Green fondly said before, "It's hotter than Wolf Womanhood."

"What about it?" Joe thought. "Cancer?"

"Not only that. The village."

"You talkin 'bout the zombies?"

"Yeeaaahhh." A quiescent pondering of the mysterious Devil's Swamp. The landfill between the Exxon Refinery and Southern University.

"Devil's Swamp zombies, all glowing'?" Mike Green asked, laughing.

"I wouldn't be laughing, li'l' padnah," Elward said, mimicking Joe Taylor, as he gestured.

"Dey say there's lots a people out there, living there. It's a hellhole. Half dead people going 'round, breakin' into people's houses, into businesses.

"Breaking in? Where at?" Joe Taylor asked seriously.

"Where you live!" Elward said, his eyes banjoing out. He was talking about the black suburbs. Scotlandville.

"What about these zombies?" Ricky Harrison thought about his mother's death. He sulked in the cloud banks of his mind. He went inside away from the heat. The brothers still stood around talking. Rayhound looked handsome smoking a Marlboro.

"These zombies are killing people. Spreading disease."

"How you know?" Mike Green asked.

"Da California dude down at the loading docks at River Bend Nuclear!"

"How do ya know he ain't fulla crud?" The way Green said it, it was funny. But it wasn't funny to Elward.

They had no idea. They surely didn't.

The village was there and it was hideous.

"I live in Scotlandville, an you telling me zombies gonna be busting into da house?"

"Believe whatever you want believe, brother." He started taking the meat off the grill. The chicken was done. The steak had been done to a turn. Rayhound, Mike Green had two finger food hotdogs in each hand, gobbling them up.

"Let's go down there . . ," Joe Taylor said.

"You crazy."

"White folks, government people, they don't give a crud about us. Or about what's going on down there," Mike Green.

"That right," Rayhound added. "They just a soon see all da black people dead."

Rayhound had some buddies he knew were in jail, Angola, and they didn't even do nothing. Police trouble. Fuggin po-lice!

"I ain't going down there."

"What you talkin' about go down there? We got to eat dis food first!" Mike Green was getting pissed, 'cause he didn't believe jack-crud about the matter.

Inside, they found Harrison watching Star Trek. But he was sound asleep on the sofa, like that pot had cleaned and purified his soul. He had some relief from his angst.

"Look at da boy."

"Let him sleep," Joe Taylor said, and they ate the food.

Chapter Twenty Four

Kendra rode in Juan's old Mercedes, with Juan at the wheel sipping some fruity light wine coolers. It was the penultimate conversation of the epoch.

She knew the diseases were coming now. Various strains of mutant viruses, nobody ever heard about. Streptocylitranstitorum Greganeion Ocillitus, HP23 and Herpes Simplex 6, Influenza, Typhoidic amyliatropic viral baccillium. Bad stuff. It would spread all round, like cocaine in her brain. That is what she needed now.

Juan broke the silence.

"It was right what you did. The government had to know." His handsome stubbled countenance glowed with radiance.

"I found out a week ago, Juan." She was petrified. Paranoia and mania all at once.

"Darling, it was good of you. Don't you see?" he said as they tooled along the interstate between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. They had just come back from the special meeting with the foremost LSU medical school doctors. Johns Hopkins specialists, all forms of biologists, specialized field representatives.

"I didn't WANT TO BE THE ONE, Juan!!!" she cried and leaned forward. Her gorgeous mane of blonde hair waved in the moment.

"I know, sweetie," Juan said softly. Their personal lives were a mess, but the biblical proportions of the repercussions of what lay ahead was Doom. The four headless Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Now there was a whole battalion, the Battle of Balaclava, all with death's head skulls.

"How many dead do they predict?" Kendra asked, hoping she had heard wrong. "Are they going to evacuate?" She knew without Juan's reply as he tried to open another wine cooler with a french cigarette in one hand and one knee on the wheel . . . more than thousands. Hundred's of thousands. There had been this incubation, this festering of the deadly illnesses. Not all would be fatal. There would be varying degrees now.

"Let's not go home now . . ." Kendra spoke quietly, softly into that great wet bleakness approaching. The exists passed by. They headed towards the Chimes where the maggoty punkers were warded off. Fended off by the upper cave dwelling social climbers who bathed regularly. Fine line that was.

She didn't exactly cry and she didn't exactly sniffle, because there was too much shock. She had put the little Chuckles Doctor business far out of mind.

That same evening, that time which rain sprayed the filth off the concrete graveyards, Ricky Harrison had finally woken up from Star Trek and eaten his barbecue ribs. Joe Taylor told him he looked like "Jethro again . . ." The booger boys were heading homeward.

"Li'l padnah, that pot done put you to Disneyland." Ricky knew what he meant. For a while, the synaptical neurons stopped firing. He had blocked off the sickly whooping cough of death's winged fluttering in his noggin.

"Yeah. I feel like a new man, revived!"

"Good for you, dude." Mike Green championed.

They drove back to the caviled cauldron, via River Road, then taking the new bridge, barges below.

"I'm as full as a tick."

"Me too, Joseph."

"I told you not to call me dat."

"Sorry."

They dropped the boy off at his terminal block of flats, Lobdell Avenue. Princes lived along this district, homeboys strung out on fortified wine, Wild Irish rose, Mad Dog twenty-twenty, and Thunderbird, the beverage of choice. Harrison was exuberant as if some crepuscular weight were pushed off his hind end. He was buoyant, as if he were fighting windmills, rather, huge iron tankards full of crude. The swimming pools for the gods. He showered to get the wog hemp funk off of him. Then put on some duds and decided to head to an old watering hole, which beat the heck out of bygone phantom days of the White Horse Tavern.

As he headed to the Chimes for some raw oysters, horseradish sauce, he whistled Mahler's Fifth, the melodious wafting from his sensitive countenance, half-cocked against the putrid air. He would see and be seen at the Chimes. He deserved a few happy hour hijinks and he would strike an attitude.

He parked on a corner across from four shaved youths bearing fascist manifestos on their t-shirts. He smiled at them and they had no response. Inside the Chimes he spotted immediately the focal point of the universe. A black hole of intense gravity force at the corner booth. A mane of blonde hair, bee stung lips like a voluptuous movie star. He was intensely mesmerized.

"Who is that guy over there?" Kendra asked, suddenly blanking out the terseness of the impending situation. This guy was extremely handsome, though carrying a beer gut a bit. His blonde hair was like straw. His sensitive countenance was once of thinness probably, but with the maturing into manhood. Those eyes of a bright blue in bewilderment and calm; a kind of treaty with struggling battles of a sort, something told her.

"I bet that guy over there used to be really good looking." She said this loud enough for the wild maned metalheads in the next booth to bend their roostertails to the bum-looking character who wore dark leisure pants and a greenish earth tone shirt. His face beamed as he sat at the bar and ordered a dozen oysters.

She was for some reason fascinated with him. Finding him ugly because he wasn't quite in shape. But a smart, interesting man, fun to just watch.

Harrison was so inward on himself this evening he had given up on the small phantasy of the creature in the corner. He looked over that away and she smiled at him. It was like her overdrive for cute boys was overdriving her biological demise of this city. Maybe she was cowling behind the knowledge and displacing it and herself. To forget herself as that Whisky Sour swam around her little belly of love. The unique handsome man Harrison ate his oysters in silence and managed to smile at himself. Everything would be okay. He just knew it. And he would occasionally glance over at the girl. Wait, maybe he had seen her in some classes once. Yeah, he remembered her, through Atkinson. That girl over there, the one who was a Fellini masterpiece of modern art, 24 frames a second through living beauty and motion. She was that legendary phantasy that Atkinson and Tomer and the others had talked about. The myth of enduring proportion lay right there. All dolled up but . . . hell she looked kind of dogged out. What did he know; she was gorgeous pouty, the way Karrie looked when she cried when they used to get a bottle of Lambrusco and watch Merle Oberon and Lawrence Olivier in "Wuthering Heights." He couldn't take his eyes off her.

When sultry Karrie had pouted she had that gorgeous effect of transforming her petulance into a dreamy state of quintessential bottled beauty. Women, girls, wounded emotionally, crying and in distress. If only he could have her today, or Beth, or Holly, or the many others that came into his life but didn't sign the six month lease. There was a goddess over there in the booth. She was coming toward the bar. The little girl behind the counter was slicing lemon wedges. The brasserie and railings had an assortment of people. Harrison knew one older lady here was heir to a fortune. There were some young brutish men there also, scouting out the elongated gait of Kendra, Sheena of the jungle. The Herculoids come to life, by golly wow.

Ricky Harrison started getting nervous. that bourbon highball was starting to seep down into the crevasses of his frame. He was a citizen. For once he didn't feel sorry for himself. Maybe he had some sort of out-of-body experience. Something indicated a rite of passage, as if he had bought a package of inner peace at K-Mart, on sale, blue light special. Or some magical spice or herb at the Broadmoor shopping center near the manicured suburbs where his father lived alone with the dachshund who was the patriarch. Which was right near the manicured graveyard where his mother was. Still. Sisters put flowers on her grave fairly consistently.

Juan thought, this boy looked scrumptious to his palette and penchant for blondes. Blue-eyed boys who stood tall and firm. Juan followed Kendra to a side of the brass-rail bar, and smiled at Harrison.

She knew she had seen him around campus. He was really bloated then. He had lost that fatness. She remembered seeing him in the quadrangle, reading and worshipping some fatalist dream in the hordes of lovely students in a miasma of students. That handsome head of hair curled up droopily to add to the swankiness. Harrison hadn't a clue.

He ordered another drink and then he would be on his way.

Kendra spoke out to the bartender when she ordered another drink.

The pretty little bartender smiled. She said, "You look like you lost your best friend." They had known each other from the beer keggers from unknown millennium ago.

"No, this man right here, is my best friend . . ," Kendra said, and managed a smile now. That Whiskey (and don't be stingy baby-Garbo) had sunk into her.

"Dat is right, my darling."

Harrison gulped an oyster into his gullet and sipped heavily on the highball.

The petulant little bartender spoke to Harrison a few seats down. On the other side of the millionaire heir, who had a stack of ten martinis standing one atop the other like a pyramid.

"How about another bourbon?"

"Thank you," he managed meekly. Kendra had her sights on him. Guided missile research and development; if they could only get her studied.

He's shy. That's nice. Sensitive and shy. But dresses for crud. A bum.

She suddenly announced, "I just presented a report that will go out on the news tomorrow . . . to the doctors, in Nawlins. There is going to be something bad happening in this town."

"I believe that," the little cute bartender said and smiled. Kendra was serious. Her eyes were lit with that visceral frisson that sparked with intensity and fear. Teary white, melting fear. "There is going to be disease, . . ." She started to say.

Juan looked at her, and grabbed her hand.

"Don't," he said quietly. Harrison looked over at her. That pouty look was coming on again.

"No, Juan . . ," Kendra said, putting the drink down. "Can I have a dozen oysters, please?

"Sure." They were shucking them in the back. Some punkers were playing surreal pool whilst on acid. The billiard balls were melting like a Dali painting. Rock and Roll was screaming all round them a bit. Kendra crunched the ice out of her drink.

"A plague. An honest to goodness plague."

Harrison stopped in mid-swallow.

"You see, I am in biochemistry. I'm good at it, too."

Juan smiled faintly.

"Lets talk about something else. Like Pestilence."

"See, Juannie baby here got my number. The little darling here is in my field also. Double major in biology, marine biology specialty."

"We are just kidding you . . ," Juan said and the oysters were placed before them sooner than they expected.

"Have y'all heard about the eel-things?" Harrison abruptly said. Kendra looked at him with that Leigh Taylor-Young nose earring Ford modeling agency gaze. He soaked up her beauty through his eyes. She was drenched with gorgeous features.

"Eel-things, honey?" It was the way he had said it; it rang true.

"Why, we call them Ichythinmambrical lamertinato ratterilinia." Juan corrected her.

"Latterilinia, not Ratterliniaaa."

"Whatever, sweetie." Kendra said. She had even the millionaire bag lady drawn inexorably from her toppling pyramid of martinis with olives staring back at them.

Kendra daubed an oyster after spearing it with a cocktail fork in the horseradish sauce.

"You see, these things have been found in nests."

"I've seen them," Harrison said. Kendra smiled.

"I've dissected them."

"But I saw them as far back as 1978."

"No crud" she said. That whiskey tenor barrage.

She was interested.

"Wasn't there a nest of them found near the Exxon docks?'

"Yes." Her voice changed.

"I did some laboring work at Exxon between semesters at LSU."

"Were you in Acacia?" she asked, off the cuff.

"Well, for two semesters I was . . ."

"I remember you . . . what's your name?'

"Ricky Harrison."

"I'm Kendra. I was not in a sorority but probably went to more keggers than the Sorority Suzies . . ." and she swallowed the Manhattan.

"I kind of dropped out after a while."

"Yeah, I know what you mean . . ." So he went on and told her the stories. About Karrie Kilshaw on the levee (well he used decorum, Kendra knew Karrie Kilshaw.) About that first sighting.

Kendra told him of what was to come. "Disease rampant. The national guard will be coming in."

He was in rapture talking to her. Hearing the bad news, he was taking it rather well. Perhaps it hadn't sunk in.

"You don't look particularly worried."

Harrison was on his last martini. Thanks to the millionaire bag lady. The bartender babe in her turtleneck said, "So Reverend Jimmie Lee Jenkins ain't as stupid as all crud."

The girl produced a lemon wedge in front of her teeth after a shot of Cuervo. Mescal was for the damned.

Harrison could see it. As Kendra talked to him, he heard the low wail of death fluttering its wings. Perhaps the machine l'infernal had beckoned its last twist of the turbine. His mother's death was just the beginning. She went on about the hearing, privy information. Juan got irritated that she was going on about rather exclusive knowledge. But soon it would be common knowledge.

"Have you heard about the village?" Harrison said.

Juan said, "All I know is that I am probably going to move back to Rio."

"Village?" Kendra wondered, as her eyes gazed into his. "What village?"

"Devil's Swamp. I work with a bunch of black guys who say some guys at the nuclear plant to whom they deliver electrical supplies, that . . ." he said. And sighed. " . . .There is a village of half dead radioactive sickly tramps and half humans." He shook his head, the self confidence two step shuffle.

"I never heard about this."

"Well, we're going down there at Devil's Swamp to take a look tomorrow."

"It's screwing amazing that none of the really big shots in the power structure give a crud about this. They don't even know."

"We don't know if its true."

"Can I have your phone number?"

"Here. . . ," and Ricky scribbled his number, ashamed of the prefix.

"I mean, if you hear about anything. I don't know if anybody would believe a wild story like that one . . . " "Wow, freaky . . ."

She gave him a teasing wink. Flirtation, something she had never forgotten since she was an undergraduate hanging around Murphy's sleazy college fresh girls bar. Nickel beer.

"A Plague? We are all gonna die?" The bartender didn't believe. They popped the last oysters in their gullets.

"Not if we get an antidote. There will be a vaccination. Mandatory. You will hear it on the news tonight. Hell, it's already probably hit the national news."

"Will there be an evacuation?" Ricky asked.

"There will be, IF there isn't an antidote to match," she said.

The little bartender with turtleneck started sobbing. "We are gonna die . . .," she whispered to herself. Kendra cried too.

"I was in A O Pi before my grades plummeted . . .," the girl said to Kendra.

"You were better off without them, sweetie . . ." Kendra said to her.

Harrison bid her and Juan goodbye. He took off for home, birddogging his way from the freethinkers and sophistry students. The punks near the Bayou bar waved at him as he swung through the gates of LSU and hooked his way onto State Street. Plague. He thought again. Plague. But antidotes. Healing from plague. He was no good drunk . . . he thought.

"That boy was cute once." Juan said. "Delicious!" The little bartender looked Juan over.

"You're gay?"

"Queer as a four dollar bill, darling!," and Kendra smiled at both of them. Masking the trance that covered all of them in a veil. She would spin her web of information through those big doctors, much different than controlling and ruling the frat boys on the hollowed campus grounds.

Chapter Twenty Five

"We're coming to pick you up Sunday night, li'l' padnah." Joseph Taylor said to a drowsy Ricky Harrison, who was recovering from highball blues at Chimes, with Oysters on the side.

"Where are we going?" Harrison asked. He had a right to know where he was going, right?

"We going to the Village." Please no, he thought.

"Why are we gonna do that?"

"Cause we got to." Joe said.

"Uh . . ," Harrison mulled it over.

"What's sa matter, you don't like Zombies?"

"Not really."

"Don't you want to know what's in Devil's Swamp?" Taylor quipped. These guys were nuts.

"What time?"

"Bout nine o'clock, how's that sound?"

"Sounds spiffy."

"Alright, li'l' padnah. Later Jethro." Click.

Silence. Harrison hung up the phone. Was this a joke for the ages? He wandered through the apartment with fetid wafting, what was new? He began to recuperate from the night before. He wondered if Kendra and Glamour queen was shooting from the hip the night previous.

"Why didn't I tell Joe Taylor that we are all gonna die?" Well, turn on the television. Sure enough.

 BROADCASTING FROM ALL THREE STATIONS . . . (Urgency seemed to be the idea here)

Channel 2, WBRZ:

We think that this epidemic is carried by new species of eel, specie type . It has been known for some time that these type of fish/snake have been spotted in several places. One near the Nuclear facility at River Bend. One near the Exxon refinery, and several in the Atchafalaya Swamp in West Baton Rouge Parish . . . partially radioactive and trace elements from refinery treatment wastes have been sighted as responsible for these creatures' spawning and proliferation. They tend to inhabit near refinery and waste disposal facilities."

Harrison hit the floor with his left hand, thud. Goddamit, Kendra was right. It was all true. Life wouldn't be the same here. And tonight he was going into this village, if there was one. To see the trash can dwellings of zombie-like creatures. Hell they were destitute men and women. This was all they were. Still, it was erie. Well, what did he have to lose?

How did one get into Devil's swamp landfill? All it was flooded swamps of marsh nearer the river. Trash that was piled on and bulldozed over. Did they live underground? Had they burrowed holes in the ground, and remained unseen? How in the hell did no one else find out about this?

He took a shower in his portable Auschwitz. He thought for a moment about his own little landfill of Chef Boyardee cans and general uncleanliness, which was next to ungodliness. After all, didn't he see eel-things dancing at the foot of his bed? With three heads? Hallucinations of an alcoholic nature. Dammit, he couldn't drink before they came! Crud! Kendra.

She ran through his head, like a stream of consciousness. A goddess implanted. Going to the village of the damned. Just like the movie. John Wyndham, the disaster British horror writer. "Day of the Triffids," the movie. Walking killer plants. Asteroid blinds everybody.

He stood outside the thatched hut from hell in Lamplighter apartments, and looked over into the projects. Mothers were talking. His neighbors came out of their doors, talking with neighbors they had never even bothered to say hello to before. All over town this was happening. Panic rose, came forth, raised its ugly head. Outpourings of telephone calls. The lines jammed. The city came alive with people, coming out of their apartments, chatting. It was just like hurricane season. Except everybody thought they were gonna die.

The yahoos out in Denham Springs where that show was taped at K-Mart; they didn't think anything. The local fatheads who once believed Huey Long started panicking. Where were those bodies lined up, prone? People sat around and drank beer and watched the Oakland Raiders trounce the Miami Dolphins.

Reverend Jenkins started praying and laying his hands on television, (One hand on your radio, and one hand on the radiator . . .): "You folks deserved this. The satan worshippers out in Ponchatoula (a bunch of new wave Keebler-booted hippies munched on cow and dog hearts . . .) have brought hell into our own backyard . . ." was heard over and over again.

Harrison sat reticent in the midst of the running around. The buying of disinfectants, bottled Kentwood spring water from Delchamps and K-Mart. Just like Hurricane Betsy was gonna hit! This wasn't a hurricane. And there were folks who didn't move an inch for a hurricane.

Harrison remained steadfast. He was evolving in his head a scenario of this thing. Yes, Marleine Harrison died. And now the whole five parishes surrounding Baton Rouge would succumb also. Including Marleine Harrison's second son!

Joseph Taylor hauled the Buick Riviera towards the Great White Hope's Apartment, the ashram with Mike Green and Rayhound in it. All were toked up on wog-hemp and the oncoming excitement.

Ricky Harrison stood trembling in his apartment. The bourbon bottle was half-slaked. It would not be touched! He would face his hobgoblins, for he was in for the duration now.

"Come one li'l padnah . . . Open up.!" Mike Green yelled through the two inches of pressed wood. In minutes they would be traipsing across acres and acres of mysterious landfill. When a man knows he may have some disease pollulating within him like a tapeworm, he felt possessed with a radiance from that knowledge of incubating disease. When one is desperate, he gets courage.

He opened that low door near the single window. Mike Green and Rayhound stood behind Joseph Taylor. They walked in.

"We gotta go . . . getting too dark already."

Outside the sun had gone down. Harrison asked, "Do I need to put camouflage on? Some shoe polish on my face?" He was surprisingly serious.

"No, do you see any shoe polish on our faces?" Rayhound laughed.

They walked to the car. Everything was going crazy. A special edition of the State Times Morning Advocate was out for the peasants. Disinfecting was taking place all over the city. The streets were filled with people, bewildered all.

They tooled down the interstate and got off at the airport exit. They wandered through the traffic of frenzied worrisome North Baton Rouge.

Entrance to Devil's swamp. Swing open the gates. No armed guards for the biggest swamp hellhole of Calcutta in the Gothic South. Let the booger boys in, along with Lord Byron, Harrison.

The topographical clumps of trash mixed with plain composites of dirt, construction scraps, paints, chemicals, all made quite a soup for them to walk through. It was rather poetic, Eliot's wasteland before them. A sweeping acreage of fecal matter to boot. This wicked band of badasses were prepared. Rayhound had brought a gun, and Harrison didn't like those things.

"Man I ain't gonna point it at you, Lurch!" Rayhound and the others seemed to be mad.

"Y'all know about the Plague! Screw it!" Rayhound said.

"We ain't all gonna die, man!" They trudged onward. The car isolated behind them as they went further into the darkness. No one of course bothers to light up a dump; nothing valuable there.

"I believe we ain't got nothing to lose. We shouldn't even have to go to work tomorrow. Ain't nobody should work that thinks they gonna die."

The vast tract of landfill, washing machines and rusty machinery, abandoned.

They heard a bit of yelling way towards the river, hundreds of yards ahead of them.

"That's what we are gonna go after. Over there," Taylor commanded. They trudged through the muck of solid styrofoam, hardened rags and assorted bleak mishmashes of this that and the other. Devil's swamp was once a swamp. Now a priceless find for the lookers. Seekers of lost diamond mines, Loch Ness, and Bermuda Triangles, Harrison thought.

Away they went, all apprehensive.

"We ain't gotta kill 'em or nothing."

"If they attack us, sheit!"

"No Rayhound, we ain't gonna kill em. We just want ta see if they are here."

"You never heard a spying? The screwing CIA?" Mike Green said in the ensuing mysterious black of night, not even a sliver of moon to shine. The smell of rotting undulating trash piles that had not been squashed and so appeared like huts or pillboxes, were all about them, all the way to the river. Where the trees and swamps hugged the levee, on out into the muddy waters.

"I'm scared crudless." More screams sounded out, of quite a sinister quality. They thought they saw and heard movement ahead of them. They would keep walking till they met something; there was something out there to be sure.

"Like you said, we ain't got nothing against zombies, right?"

"There ain't nothing bout no zombies. Ain't no such thing!" Mike Green said. More screeching of a horrific nature. But nowhere in sighting this people-of-the-pit syndrome, were seen any sort of buildings. The night was awesomely bleak and dark, the stench arose from under their feet. They crunched over the blemishes in the landfill. They sank in some areas, of myriad colors and loose remains.

"We are halfway there. I don't see nothing."

"This is stupid, man!"

"One day we gettin' us gospel bird at Elward's barbecue and now we are all sitting around here with diseases in our bodies, says them mothers on the news shows. And we are walking round a garbage dump."

Rayhound wasn't in the best mood. Condemned men seldom were.

"We might not die, Rayhound," Harrison paused in his role as optimist for a change. For perhaps that was his turning point. The sticking point where he had made a choice away from the frothy bourbons and ensuing night guants. His past seemed no longer worthy of being trod upon by his negative respites. He was beginning to feel the freedom of a man with the burden lifted from his aching backside. His momma he thought was in a heaven he may have started to believe in. The alter boy days hadn't been anything but a lost cause. His waxing about Cathedrals in the middle of Eliot's wasteland, Devil's swamp, (where was the Devil?) was sobering.

Joe Taylor looked over at Harrison as they walked in formation it seemed. The tight unit. Zombie Patrol. Small squelching yawps from the enemy of invisible powers, it seemed. Joe Taylor smiled at Harrison. The boy began to be thought of in a different light. The way you could tell about a man who was tormented; when that suffering was gone, you could endure anything. Good man. Jethro and Lurch both.

They looked into the nooks and crannies at the water's edge, of the great bleakness of marshy swamp primordial, manmade proliferation of plastic mush. A thick, goodly soup it was. The sturdiness of the ground of compacted high density trash below their feet became soggy.

It seemed empty of Zombies.

"Man there ain't nothing here!"

"Black man your a fool!" Rayhound said with a mania, "Now we can get our skinny asses outta here and go get screwed up!"

"Shaddup Rayhound. You think them zombies gonna be waiting for us. They hidin'." The incongruous nature of the entire idea, but it seemed to fit beautifully with the invidious epidemic that was in vitro elsewhere.

Joe Taylor paced around. He seemed quite intent on rustling out the zombies. If there were to be zombies, he would certainly flush them out. Mike Green said he had to take a dump.

"Well go on over there and take one."

"Screw you. Some Zombie come grab my ass. Just get your smelly ass back to the car!" He was only half kidding. Walking talking Nixon. There were several eel-things lying about in the water. Floating breasts up, expanded and bloated carcasses of bellied monstrosities. Walking Nixon.

"That's the friggin eel-things!" Rayhound said, now seeming to get interested in the matter at hand.

Harrison shrugged. "That's what I saw in 1978!" He sighed.

The vast wasteland of unruly landfill, a premium trash dump of the worst order. The sky sat lightly on the river horizon. The moon cast a glow ebbing up the river, winding and curving sharply. There were noises of a dying city in the wake of this foul dusty hellishness of Pyrahus that the philosophy professors had premised their oral arguments about. What was the hellishness of Pyrahus, going down to Pyrahus in Plato's Republic? The answer. A three fuggin headed snake, make it twenty-five or more rubber corpses dangling in the marshes. Still in the cesspools of the humus of promethean life. The face of Death, the hellhole that this city of industrial good had become. The twilight of man trying to live peaceably with carcinogens, roentgens, and Reddy Kilowatt stomping on his very ass. Walking, talking, they started home.

But Harrison saw something, yonder past the crudcans turned sideways,the rotted wood, and the chairs, refrigerators. Strangling with stench these boys emerged from the pit of the sinister strains not of this earth.

There seemed to be a series of holes, large enough to squeeze someone's torso through. Though no one would cop to wanting to do that very thing.

"It's screwing tunnels, like the Viet Cong!" Mike Green said. "Zombies?" Rayhound said, now sobering up from his Sun Gold White Port elixir. Those boys stood there grimacing from the monstrous chemicals that oozed from the rusty openings. They were old sewer lines.

"Now, we don't know crud about whether there's anybody in there."

"Look over here! See those things? Half eaten food, rotted stuff. Don't it look like somebody been living out here?"

"What is this crud?" Mike Green said. Greenish fecal matter of hell. Bovine mushiness of bilious brine.

"Sheit!" They all came over. The radial perimeter of foul sewage of human origin was a waste pile of drippings of bilge shiny with flecks and blood smattering in the stool. If that is what it could be called, filled the air with exquisite raunchiness.

"Someone done been taking radioactive cruds! Over here!" Rayhound said. "Man, you took a crud?"

Crud, Rayhound. You too screwed up to come along!"

Rayhound shut up. There were sounds about. Weird sorts of rustling in various junk heaps as big as the three great pyramids of Cheops. These were funeral pyres of Dow Chemical, Proctor and Gamble.

They were here. They are here now, and they are probably watching. These fricking pyramids were probably housing all sorts of zombies. Half alive, probably insentient, fever dreams, a consumption of the brain through feverish radiation. Diseases rampant from direct contact with the crud-snakes. They were a touched people. A clan. They were here, he was sure. He felt something watching him here in Eliot's wasteland. The valley of ashes, for the shadow of death, for I fear evil.

"We going or not?" They were all bent out of shape from the ensuing darkness. The stars coming out in the mattress of cumulus, the offending stench of a most noxious order penultimate. They began walking the hell away from the shadowy forms that were perhaps lurking from pits and pyramids of old washing machines, refrigerators. Nocturnal vampires of the worst kind, oozing and eyelashes and suppurating like brine.

The logistical formations of these piles of junk which appeared to be heaped up, were now some sort of community. The drain pipes near the river, that nebulous region of pyrrhic lore. There were lurkers in the shadows of the pipes.

They were there. Ricky Harrison believed this to be so. Nature tried to grown plants and other unclassifiable fungi and bizarre fetid life amidst the manmade textile city of Zombies, now silent and hulking and waiting.

But these people were probably once regular people. Maybe it was like rabies, you get bitten by a bat or mad dog! You get that incubation of maggoty insanity going to fester in you. And you split the offending animal's skull wide open to determine if it had been "touched." That way lied madness. They were all touched.

They walked away after they had peered into the drainpipes from which inside was heard rapping as if people were walking around down there. Well, if they as big as a man in diameter, it was nobody's business to go creeping around in things. Rumor and innuendo and zombies or heal the plague victims? It was all a crap shoot, he thought as they stopped peering in there and walked back to the car. Rayhound peered behind him like they would run out of those little pyramids and labyrinthine pipes. And grab him and pull his handsome little skinny ass into the gaping maw of hell itself!

Through the expensive wasteland of all the city's cumulative junkheart, Harrison mused the imponderables taunting him. The zombies were just a piecemeal fragment of the overall soon-to-be plague.

Joe Taylor and Elward were basically going to get stoned in as quick a manner as possible. There was a bottle of fortified Thunderbird waiting in the Riviera for the jaundiced squadron of brothers. Rayhound smoked a cigarette and gazed intently as his eyes maneuvered this way and that over the vastness of the heaps. The indian mound pyres were in lines however crooked all round the flattened heaps of trash. Roiling valleys of toxins and rubbish of the damned.

Harrison trudging along by himself. He had wanted to find something superiorly preternatural in his compulsive quest for the seething wretchedness. As if it would put him smack dab in this rotting, dying city. As lone figure, taunting those refinery chemistry sets of the gods.

They got into the car pretty much not caring for the nonce a whit about Zombies. May have well been an old movie the absence of fright in the matter as the night air was beginning to be clear of flies, fetid odors pervading. They were discovering nothing. There were no zombies. Just perhaps a whole city of corpses walking round, incubating within themselves the rancid delirium and viruses that could possible succumb them. Time had stopped. Life had more value in this waking tide, now that lives of the entire city were at stake. Things would probably come to a halt, there would be several panics. The media was trying to keep it down to a simple threat that would be nipped in the bud.

The Riviera rolled on past the slick road of muck. Their shoes caked with brownish orange sawdust gunk as a reminder to root out the truth of the matter. Communal swigs of the bottle of Thunderbird and the intoxicating pot smell made pretty much an instant reverie within the confines of the closed auto. Harrison was beginning to become a brother. What would the frat ratters think of this; black man haters one and all weren't they? Well, life was going to take on that meaning of precious commodity. There would be more news pieces. There would be folks like the goddess Kendra, making antidotes and cures for the entire city. The nation was bending towards this black hole of Calcutta like sizzling current of national interest. People had already begun leaving the city. 

 Chapters 26 thru 30  will be up on August 1st. 

Visit M.F. Korn's web site,
MFKorn's Dandy Ghoul Asylum of the Literary Insane

June 1999 HofP