I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I’m introduced to one,
I wish I thought “What Jolly Fun!”
Raleigh
Oh, shit. I guess there’s one less bitch you gotta worry about.
Easy-E
Coakes followed a squat truck along the highway. This far from civilization, truckers were the easiest way to find company. Whichever cab you picked, be it a tridem artic’ or a single cabin reefer, you could be sure that where it stopped would have whores like Turkish restaurants have roaches.
Coakes loved truckers, sausage lipped, peaked capped road warriors; crisscrossing the great plains, streaming their seed, a great greenback river, shouldering the small towns of fly over America, desert economies that would dry up in weeks without their treaclish love. Once at a casino in Parump, Coakes had met the pimp king, the sum in the great sexual equation; a velure coated Negro with a feather fedora and an ivory cane. Coakes had spent a happy evening in the back of the king’s poon carriage, a converted London bus, with tinted windows and a great wide soil-resistant bedding. After he’d bathed in whore saliva, and toweled off on wisps of crappy pubis; he’d chatted with the pimp over whiskey sodas in a casino bar.
‘I stick ta dem truckas like worms in a gooses ass,’ the king had told him.
‘Dem mens has needs my ladies can fulfill,’ he’d laughed, and Coakes had bought him another drink, awestruck at the purity of vision.
Poon and the road, what else was there in the end?
When he followed, as he now did, a road warrior, cleaving the highway in an eighteen wheel attack vehicle, Coakes would don a trucker hat, tune his radio to a dead channel, and breath in heavy whispers into an empty packet of camel.
‘Howdy bubba, old faithful calling in from a four wheeler on channel nineteen, ten-twenty’s Highway Nine over,’ he’d say. And other garbage he’d picked up from airport novels and Neil Young albums; feeling for a moment like an ‘owner-operator’ himself, hauling a cargo up the endless highway, one arm cleaved off from a careless drive by, one nut toothed out by a trailer trash ex wife, one hun’dert percent Amerikin.
Coakes woke alone, in bed with a girl. A cheap, hard bodied, butter face prostitute, sprawled like an ugly starfish across the mattress. He dropped a hand to her beef wallet, and fiddled with it half heartedly. After a minute, he lifted his fingers and sniffed. She smelt of latex and his own squeezy-cheese ball sack residue. Her cunt was cold, dessicated, the dry root of some slow decaying plant. He slept again.
Coakes woke, leaned over the edge of the mattress, and dry heaved into the cool air-conditioned room. His breath was fetid, horrid lingering puffs that shifted with the glub of his face. He rolled and stood and pried on vast y-fronts, skid marked parachutes which gummed to his sticky hide. Coakes has half way through his toilet, having sloshed and swallowed Colgate Total Mouthwash, and run a wet face-towel over the great dessicated raisin lumps of his plumbing, when he remembered the hooker. He grunted and smirked hideously at his reflection, recalling how he’d coaxed the girl with coke and twenties to re-enact passages from his pocket encyclopedia of sexual deviance, a book he’d carried everywhere since childhood. They’d roved backward through the book, from fellatio to felching - a practice technically impossible for the whore, a woman, to perform - moved on, to a remorseless protocol of donkey punches, futile, as Coakes could no longer ejaculate without a set of lips locked over his fat, short member; a pair of eyes mournfully gazing up at him. Then they’d graduated to A… Coakes dropped the toothbrush he was using to scrape a tunnel through his herniated anus, and half fell into the motel’s bedroom, lifting himself over the edge of the mattress. Her purpled lips formed a tight ‘o’, like the mouth of a well stretched asshole. The jellyfish eyes were open and clouded. Coakes fell back, landed hard, rolling about like an upturned sea turtle. A, a for asphyxiation. He tried to sit up, belched, a bubble forming and bursting on his lips, rotten egg-yolk oiling his face and neck. The girl was dead, he’d killed her. The mess from her colon and bladder sack had pooled, a black stain on the mattress. He tried to think, but his mind farted and fouled up. Images returned, her giggle when the cocaine drip soured the back of her tongue, her gulp as his fingers first brushed her anus. Her tears as he slapped the raked the carpet burns on her breasts. He couldn’t remember much after he had her lap at the turkey skin between his balls and hole. When had she jerked and gone limp? A sudden thought hit him and he stood up, looked to the bed, almost tripped over a vomit filled bin, and slapped the whore in her face.
“Wake up, you bitch! You’re only kidding, trying to fuck more money out of me!” but she still didn’t move. Her tongue protruded purple rude from her jaw.
Coakes kissed the dry lips.
“Wake up baby,” he whispered, “Don’t be kidding daddy now.”
He fell backwards onto the bed, slipped into in a pool of mixed nameless fluids. Fat tears fell and dribbled slowly down his checks. Coakes sat up, grabbed a small leather bag from the bedside and pushing fat fingers in, retrieved a pill, hungrily swallowed, then another. He swooned back again, next to the body, and closing his tear stained eyes, drifted into merciful black. Later, he woke up, coked up, and fucked the corpse. How many chances do you get, he thought, and crossed out the finally entry in N section of his little black book.
It was a bright hot afternoon in Nevada, and the motels alarm clock beeped 13:00. Iago Coakes, hands clad in thick rubber gloves to keep the blood off, ignored it. He was busy dragging the dead weight of a prostitute he had brutally murdered into the spacious en-suite john. When he shut them in, the restroom smelt of dead girl and stale sex. The whole room was a shower, with a drain at the centre of the floor, and Coakes hit the faucet, gasping at the sting of icy water, and began clumsily to strip the girl of her identifying jewelery. In the mirror, his face seemed enormous, sweaty and slick from the unheated showerhead. His hair hung lank and insipid, and his hungover eyes bulged horribly. He padded back into the bedroom, dripping, and peeled on a yellow plastic raincoat he’d picked up in the giftshop. From the floor he took a rusted hack saw, a half blunt tool he’d carried for years the cars trunk, finally useful. As he began to saw at the girl’s wrist, Coakes noticed an incongruent detail. The whore, conventional in every other way, wore a woven wrist band, red with tiny bells stitched on at intervals. He moved to tear it from her, stopped. It was ‘87 and on Emma’s wrist, the same band, blood red in the blue of her bedroom, knitting in near silence - under replica posters of the Moulin Rouge as he lay watching, naked, slender and satisfied as he would ever be. For a little moment, silence between them, an embittered glance, and he remembered then as now how beautiful she was, under down soft waves, and sad with it, and he felt the intolerable misery of the veil of time as details bled to fancy, Jenna’s wrist mixing with the one he’d clear cut through, her fingers with the dark and stiff fingers of the cold, dead hand. He started on the shoulder, his biceps aching already as he worked at the heavy bone of the socket. The arm came loose suddenly, tearing off with a wrench. Coakes wrapped his fingers around the protruding double bulb of the humerus, peeled back the flesh like a surgical glove. He set to work on the next arm, hacking at the shoulder as before, stripping the flesh so that it lay in chunks bleeding sullenly into the drain. His hands were gunged already, the coat up to his armpits, drenched in a murky slop of girl parts.
Coakes’s stomach hurt, and he thought of the great clouds of memory and of how life existed as a moving gap in the cover; a glimpse of sea, woods and archipelago - and as he set to work hacking at the body, he wished that someday the clouds might lift and all the lands of his life expose themselves to the sweet gentleness of sun, that he might find a valley, a safe place to settle in. He sharted, a mushed turtle head poking warmly against the cusp of his slacks, and realised he was missing ‘Project Runway’.
Coakes trunk seems to sag as he crawled along the back roads of New Mexico. In back he’d slug a gallon drum of petrol and the washed clean hacksaw. The desert nearby, yellow and orange and daubed with the faded khaki of Creosote bushes, was still too populous. As he drove, his eyes scanned every branching roadway for a dust track to nowhere. A dirt road he could skirt down, till it disappeared from sight, then pull off and wreck the undercarriage of the Saab, crashing it through the rough ground of the big open, till they were far from sight; somewhere to burn and bury the hateful muck that hung low in the boot of the car. Each vehicle that passed drove Coakes further down into the hot plastic of his seat. Each driver’s eyes grazed his own and left him blinking, shuddering the big car against the dirty shoulders of the road. The cab was rancid with his fumes and the sticky slaughterhouse funk of the girl. Coakes held his breath to keep from puking, kept the windows up in case some vile carrion sensed the kill from on high, and swung down crowing and hooking at him through the thin steel shield of ceiling - the filth of it’s claws, deep in his sweat slick hide. Coakes spotted a road, a track cutting across the tarmacadam, with no mail box and a wooden signpost. Promising. He rocked the vehicle round the turn without slowing, spit when he gasped and caught a mouthful of the stench; carried on, tongue like a piss rod in his mouth; took another back road five miles up and on through the endless flatland, dry heaving endless waves of nausea.
The cop was sedentary, heavy set and icy tough, striding slowly to the car, taking his time. He grew larger in the wing mirror, and Coakes began to hyperventilate. ‘Christ the smell’, he thought, pawing at the door and falling to the hot dry earth. Far away, Coakes could see the cop pull his gun, could hear him barking something. Coakes puked then, the vomit a chunky septic pus, a thick flow that left his mouth and nose with equal ferocity. The heaving was an endless cleansing purge, wracking his torso; pumping up from the deepest quarters of his stinking gut. Coakes’ eyes stung and watered simultaneously. His arms shook, inadequate to the task of bearing the grunt of his chub. Finally it finished, and he dropped forward into the slop of sand and eggy sick. After a moment, he felt the flat of the cops boot begin roll him on his back.”Christ you’re disgusting,” said the cop, his voice clear to Coakes for the first time, his cop face young and callous.
Coakes coughed, and took a long breath.
“Please… Water.’
The pig shook his head.
“You big drunk motherfucker. Don’t you know no one lives down here? Aint nothin ‘out here for you. You hear me? Jesus..”
He paused.
“You know you done shit yourself too?” The cop began to hook the silver of his buckle. Coakes started to panic, his head tossing back and forth; scenes from the film Deliverance flashing before his eyes, like streakers at an infant beauty pageant.
“No.. No!” He choked out, but could not rise - the cop’s boot was a clamp on his sternum.
“Easy there fat man.”
His big uncircumcised prick was out now, soft and bobbing in his hand.
“I don’t want your butt fat man, I’m just gonna clean you off a little.”
As he spoke a thick arc of piss sprang forth and struck Coakes full in the face. Instinctively, he opened his mouth to cry out, and the slash whet his tongue and set him coughing soapy piss bubbles, as the stream his his eyes.
“Ye hah,” said the cop, shaking Coakes’ belly with his boot.
The piss continued, bitter and endless.
“Mercy.” Coakes whispered, his mouth full of hot pungent liquid piss.
“Mercy.”
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