LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 1
Luke Nineteen Twenty-Seven
by Cameron Ashley & Jimmy Callaway
AND so it was written (and thusly snickered at):
That Reverend Calvin Dumble had a premonition of the coming apocalypse and spent ten years underground in his backyard bunker. That he believed that while he was bunkered down—eating naught but canned goods, astronaut meals and tabs of bad acid— the apocalypse he had sensed came and went. That the world into which he re-emerged was but a dusty wasteland populated by the lapdogs and whores of Satan. That he spent his remaining days killing the wicked and recruiting the righteous. That he was angry like a nut-struck prizefighter, like a junkyard Cerberus. That he was several steaks short of a barbeque, and that his bad-acid eating ways indelibly warped the parts of his brain that discriminated between the real and the not.
However, Lily Mudge said that it was all true, except the part about the brain warping. If anything, it had been re-warped into the correct configuration. She also said that Calvin Dumble had Jesus in his ear and thunder in his voice and iron in his fists and a spring in his step like a man a quarter century younger than he was, and who’s to say they were right and she was wrong? When Dumble baptized Lily and proclaimed her not only saved, but also once again whole and now fuelled by the righteous wrath of the LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 2 divine, she became wet in a way that had nothing to do with the waters into which she’d been dunked. Lily knew beyond a shadow of moral doubt that Calvin Dumble was a prophet and a two-fisted do-gooder the likes of which this earth had not seen since some guy in Jerusalem said it’d be really groovy if everybody just mellowed out some.
How it all came to pass is a story of note, but the details may be hazy and some events jumbled. What Lily recalled with utmost certainty was the name of the bar
(Billy’s House of Shimmy) and the man who signed her checks (Billy).
Billy was a former trucker who got mildly cashed up running crystal meth all over the Southwest, cash which he invested in perhaps the rankest titty bar you ever creeped your peepers at. Billy was a man of dubious musical taste: a little bit country, a little bit rock ‘n’ roll, a whole lotta garbage. He liked his women lanky and loose. He liked Wild
Turkey by the rafter. He was as prone to violence as he was to premature ejaculation.
But in the two years Lily danced at Billy’s House of Shimmy, distasteful as it was, she never had a check bounce and she kept every red cent she made in tips.
Lily didn’t see Calvin Dumble pull the big black ’56 Cadillac Fleetwood hearse that had belonged to his daddy into the lot of Billy’s House of Shimmy, as she was inside with pasties on her nipples and a thong wedged up her ass. She later imagined, however, that it arrived with the very grace and sunny disposition of the vengeful Lord, as did
Dumble himself when he stepped through the front doors, the lovingly polished sawed- off held between his hands.
Upon Dumble’s entry, all members of the Iceman Dan’s Heating and Plumbing bowling team immediately rose and reached for the various sidearms each kept strapped to various parts of their bodies. Everyone knew an Iceman Dan man rolled heavy LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 3 everywhere he went; their rivalry with Greasy Dick McGee’s Drywall extended well beyond the scarred lanes down at Two Palms Bowl.
Standing there in the open door, the sun pouring in behind him, Dumble also knew that he and he alone in this titty bar walked with the Lord. The few non-bowler patrons in Billy’s fled to the fire exits, boners quickly deflating inside their sweatpants, trampling over any poor girl in their way who was still frozen in mid-jiggy. This included Ginny Gams, who had long pressed for the unionization of strippers and, had she been successful, would have been compensated for her paralysis instead of being forced to spend her remaining days turning tricks for johns with a thing for female
Murderballers.
Anyhow, Lily—legs locked around the main pole of the side stage, holding herself off the floor with one hand—watched as Dumble racked the sawed-off and heard his prayer:
“Forgive them, Lord, for they know not who they fuck with.”
Back then, neither did Lily. She could not recognize the satanic codes embedded in the fine stitching of those white bowling shirts with the powder blue trim, bowling pins erect like obscene phalluses on their backs. As Dumble did not yet know her, biblically or otherwise, Lily had not yet learned the true evil of bowling and of those who practice its dark art. You may scoff at such a notion, but staring down Iceman Dan’s boys, guns held in their ball-fingering hands, even the hardest man the desert ever birthed would agree with what Dumble would tell you:
Only the deservedly damned doth bowl. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 4
Dumble shaved three times a day, once after each meal, and the only bearded man he trusted was a Jewish carpenter. Iceman Dan was in a different trade entirely, and if his shaggy, wild facial hair was not enough to further heighten tensions in Billy’s House of
Shimmy, just then his tongue jutted forth to lick at his thin lips and the hair of his mustache, a tic that went back to his vocational school days. Dumble saw that the tongue, aside from being peculiarly long, was also forked. This may sound crazy, but Iceman
Dan’s own self-proclaimed predilection for cunnilingus was, after all, well known throughout several counties. And several girls he’d gone down on would swear that the pink serpent in his mouth, when unfurled, rivaled the one in his Levis.
The music pounded over the speakers, hammering the electricity in the room to a fine edge. It was Ol’ Dirty Bastard (rest his soul), off his second solo album, and when the chorus kicked in, the colored girls said: “Jesus, I’m rollin’ wit’chu! Jesus, I’m rollin’ wit’chu!”
Dumble smiled.
His first shot took Iceman Dan’s head clean off, the scattershot embedding itself into Pretty Boy’s high cheekbones and rechristening One-Eyed Steve as No-Eyed Steve.
Pretty Boy’s howls of pain, in Dumble’s ears, were the perfect soundtrack to the vision of
Iceman Dan’s demon form as it was dragged back down to the lightless cities beneath.
Dumble’s smile widened, but pride was a sin, so he wiped it off his face quick smart. Killing the wicked and demonic was not a task one should gloat over, lest one become a like sinner. Dumble set his jaw and went about his holy housecleaning.
The rest of the Iceman Dan team, all ex-Army, ex-Marines, ex-cons, dropped and rolled before Dumble could pump the shotgun again, and his second shot went wide, LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 5 shattering the one-way mirror to the manager’s office. Behind his desk, Billy looked up, mouth hanging open, but he kept a firm grip both on the bottle of booze in one hand and the other on Tiny Tina’s head bobbing up and down in his lap.
Dumble dodged to his left, throwing a table on its side to cover the team’s return fire. “You sanctimonious motherfucker!” screamed the bowler named College, his shirt smeared with Iceman Dan’s brains, “I’ve got free will, and I’m not afraid to use it!”
Dumble drew his .44 from inside his coat, and used College’s taunts to guide his aim. His mark was true, and the fruits of College’s mail-order B.A. in philosophy were splattered all over the back bar. Had Dumble known College was a Sartre man, his smile would perhaps have returned.
What was left of the team opened fire again, Stimey’s Uzi a rapid-fire hornet’s nest of proud Israeli death-dealing. Dumble ran to the other side of the room in a crouch, racking the shotgun with one hand and popping loose shots with the Magnum. Beneath the shattered window to Billy’s office, Dumble made a quick weapons check, as across the bar, Smitty, Felcher, and Stimey slapped fresh clips into place and prepared to war with their fates.
Billy, meanwhile, had decided that if anyone was gonna shoot up his place, it’d better be somebody he wouldn’t mind raping later. He grabbed Tina by the pony tail and pulled her off him, her mouth making a wet pop. Holding his pants up with one hand, he grabbed the machete from under his desk. Approaching Dumble on panther’s feet, Billy sized up the back of the big preacher’s neck, and his eyes made a dotted line across it:
Cut Here. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 6
Lily could not bowl for shit, nor did she really care to. Last time she’d gone, she had barely scored in the double digits. Perhaps she just had bony girl arms, or perhaps this had been God telling her she was meant for a higher purpose than a perfect 300.
Regardless, finally releasing her legs from their vise grip on the pole, she somersaulted off the stage and hit the floor at a dead run, swooping up Iceman Dan’s Brunswick bag in one well-manicured hand.
Dumble saw her coming in hard from his left, and brought the Magnum around to aim it at her cute little forehead. But as he cocked back the hammer, the Light filled his eyes. Yes, the girl bore dangerously down on him, but even were he blind, he could see she was righteous in her fury. Her muscles lean and straining, her breasts heaving and tassels spinning—clearly, she jiggled in the name of the one true God. If she was coming for him, then so be it, he thought. Dumble decocked the pistol, pointed the barrel at the floor, and closed his eyes.
Lily had hefted some heavy ball bags before, but this was ridiculous. Gripping the handle firmly with both hands, she swung it around in an arc that nearly took her off her feet, bony girl arms or no. As Billy raised the machete shoulder-high, Lily swung in through the busted office window, smashing every tooth in his head and driving his nose up into his right frontal lobe. He collapsed to the ground, the last fall of this particular dirty-faced angel.
Dumble, having felt no passing to a plane any higher than this here mortal one, opened his eyes, and the Light filled them once again. The Light held out a hand to him, and he gripped it gently, fearing its holiness would sear his very flesh. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 7
As Dumble stood enraptured, Smitty, Felcher, and Stimey ditched their heaters and took a quick-ass powder, sensing that the getting was good so it was a good time to get.
Dumble, thoroughly distracted, let them run. Even though the constant slaughter of the lapdogs of Satan was his holy duty, he also figured it was about time he started gunning for the lap on which they sat. That brings us, if you’ll forgive and indulge me, to a former street-fighting, Mexican Mafia-assassinating, dog fight-promoting digression by the name of La Gorda.
#
La Gorda: owner/operator of La Gorda’s Putero.
La Gorda: five hundred plus pounds of Mexican temper and man-hate.
La Gorda: the biggest lap in the county. The lap to which Smitty, Felcher, and
Stimey went running.
La Gorda: we’ll meet her soon enough. Too soon for the more faint-hearted, I’m sure.
#
Anyhow, back in Billy’s House of Shimmy, Lily clapped her hands in front of
Dumble’s eyes, awakening him from his trance. He saw the Light dim and take back the form of a fine daughter of Eve, with meat in all the places Adam’s boys liked it.
Lily saw the look on his face, the creases formed from constant scowling which melted as he grew tender in her presence. It touched her deep and pure.
“Let’s you and me get the fuck outta here,” she said.
# LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 8
The stretch of highway had a real name, but no one ever used it and neither shall we. Skidmark Row is what folks called it, named, they say, after Jimmy Joe Jimmy organized pick-up truck drag races there in the ‘50s. Many a child was conceived under the moonlight at a certain hollow spot of land, near a speed limit sign with a face full of buckshot. They say that high levels of mental retardation and deformation amongst those borne from the sweaty, moonshine-soaked rutting at Penetration Point were the result of drag race-tainted air, the gasoline fumes and burnt rubber particles. But no one knows for sure why so many web-toed kids and microcephalics can trace their lineage to this spot. Could just be the place was cursed, a view which they who see things Dumble’s way would be inclined to take.
Penetration Point sat at one end of Skidmark Row, also bookmarked by Billy’s
House of Shimmy, and was the start of a long stretch of road filled with enterprise upon enterprise of hellish, immoral, commandment-breaking, taboo-embracing, illicit substance-pushing, surgically-enhanced flesh-peddling, devil music-playing businesses that had little regard for naught but under-the-counter gain.
Jimmy Joe Jimmy knew not what he had birthed when he founded his pick-up drags some half-century earlier, and the area soon succumbed to gambling and, quickly thereafter, vice after vice until there were no vices left to succumb to. Jimmy saw not a penny from his ever-swelling Frankenstein monster and died of syphilis on the steps of a low-rent whorehouse nearby sometime in 1988.
Far as Dumble was concerned, Skidmark Row was a very literal outpost of Hell.
Denizens of the underworld had settled in comfortably in our ruined, post-apocalyptic LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 9 wasteland and were having themselves a time. It was more than this good Christian man could bear, so he took it upon himself to bat clean-up for the Rapture.
And so he sat in his daddy’s hearse under the buckshot-riddled speed limit sign at
Penetration Point, and outlined his plan to a rapt Lily in a voice made of gravel, tobacco and deepest rumbling bass—a vocal cocktail that surely comprises the voice of a real man.
He said:
“I’m gonna kill every last one of these demon sons’abitches nesting on this here stretch of track and return ‘em to the underworld what spawned ‘em. I’ll be doin’ it for many a reason, primarily because it’s the Godly thing to do, but secondarily because they kept such a rare source of purity and light as yourself captive for purposes of witchcraft and black mass ritual. Crowley woulda called you a Scarlet Woman. A muse for the conjuring of evil things, a tool of satanic magic. Babalon. Any Christian man would take one look at you and realize you ain’t no Scarlet Woman. You ain’t no color but white.”
Lily, more modestly covered now in a tank top and cut-off jeans, studied Dumble, his silver hair, the lines on his face that read like the Rosetta Stone of hard-living. His ice-blue eyes, his lips wide and full, his teeth straight as small ivory tombstones. She had never really thought of herself as a black magic muse, but now as she pondered on it, the notion made some sense: they had been trance-like, those glazed-over serial-killer looks in the eyes of the stinky, filthy-fingered pervs who stuffed grubby dollar bills in her garter with one hand while masturbating with the other. She’d previously put this down to the fact that she was the holy trinity of tight little numbers—nubile, firm, and top- heavy—but hearing Dumble, she was open to the idea of satanic hocus-pocus in the air at LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 10 the House of Shimmy. Billy, after all, owned every single Sabbath record, even the Tony
Martin ones. And that stuffed moose head mounted above his bar had some kinda fucked-up presence, no doubt.
Lily was a girl with a big imagination but little actual brains. She was what folks would have once referred to as “fey.” Like many young people, Lily felt trapped and doomed by her backwater surroundings and often felt that her only means of escape would be to hitch a ride with some trucker and suck his chubby for the privilege of the trip. Being both good-hearted and adverse to blowjobs (when sober, anyhow), this method of escape was never exploited.
Lily had heard the legend of Calvin Dumble, as many had, and followed his wanderings in what passed for the local rag. She had secretly prayed for Dumble’s arrival, and now that it was here, she intended to make the most of it.
“You’re gonna need my help, Reverend Dumble,” she said, “I know these parts and I know the bad folk you speak about. I can drive stick, not real good, but I can manage, and I know of you and your work and have been chronicling it through the fine medium of comics.”
This was true. Lily drew crudely-illustrated comic strips featuring Dumble’s adventures. Her work had been met with silence by the New York funnybook publishers to which it was sent, but Lily felt it was just a matter of time before Ralphie, the postman who sold magic-mushroom soup on the sly, would rap on her trailer door, a contract from those Marvel boys in his hand. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 11
She reached into her dufflebag and produced one of her works, Rev. Calvin
Dumble vs. Pederast Bill. Dumble thumbed through it. Lily chewed on her thumbnail as he read silently, mouthing the words to himself.
“This here shit is gosh-darned beautiful,” he finally said.
#
The first place Lily took Dumble to was the nearby barn of farmer Randy
Adamson, where bare-knuckle fights were held on a fortnightly basis. The only rule governing the bouts at Adamson’s barn was No Rape. This may sound obvious on the face of it, but the rule had to be instituted after a victorious combatant, who shall remain nameless, took his humbling of a particular opponent to levels well beyond what Lord
Queensbury would consider ungentlemanly.
Lily sat behind the steering wheel of the Fleetwood, blue smoke puffing from the exhaust. The doorman asked Dumble for a password. Dumble gave him one in the form of a bullet to the face, coating several in the back row with shards of skull and bits of gray matter. From there, Dumble let his twin Desert Eagles roar, killing ten and mortally wounding eight. Once the guns were spent, he ripped a thick wall-plank loose and went to work with it, swinging like a man beating back a mob of lepers coming for his chunk of the True Cross.
Soon, all were dead save bare-knucklers Polecat Janson and Peril Conroy, who were main-eventing the evening’s bouts. Dumble dropped his flesh-covered club, raised his dukes, stepped into the bloodstained squared circle drawn on the barn floor in chalk, and prepared to go two-fisted on their asses. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 12
“Will you two get on your knees and pray to Jesus for His Forgiveness? Will you boys do that for me? You’re fit and strong and the Lord has a mission for you that involves many a can of whoop-ass and good Christian lads to pop them open.”
Polecat and Peril had gone one five-minute round prior to Dumble’s arrival.
Polecat appeared to have gotten the better of it, but blood ain’t much of an indicator of which way a fight’s swaying except as a visual clue as to who’s doing the bleeding.
Blood’s just blood, and in Dumble’s experience (himself a backyard pugilist of some notoriety in his youth), the getting of color don’t mean nearly as much as shaking limbs and furious breathing do. Both these boys were slick with sweat, but they were lean and fit from farm duties. In short: neither man was to be taken lightly.
Blood and gore had spattered the barn lights, and everything was a weird tinge of hell-red as a result. It was fitting, Dumble thought, for this showdown of the righteous versus the wicked. As he landed a jab flush on Polecat’s nose, a sulphuric smell rose from somewhere. Then the dead sat upright and began to boo him.
The racket caught Dumble off-guard. Polecat landed a sweet hook that sent him knock-kneed. Dumble, ironically enough, had the chin from hell and no man possessed enough thunder in his fists to shut out his lights, but he was rocked. Peril slipped behind
Dumble and landed a kidney shot so wicked that Dumble actually blasphemed. Polecat pushed Peril aside and came running in with a Muay Thai knee to the face. It sent
Dumble to the floor bloody-nosed.
Then came a sound. The rich, soul-stirring sound of gospel music:
From Him who loves me now so well.
What power my soul shall sever? LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 13
Dumble looked up. A halo of canaries circled haphazardly about his head. They had been roughly plucked and charcoaled and wore looks of pity on their burned-up faces.
Their tiny beaks opened wide and in unison, they sang:
Shall life or death, shall earth or hell?
No! I am His for ever.
Dumble rolled to his side and got up, giving his head a shake or three. Polecat
and Peril had morphed into a single two-headed, four-armed beast. Dumble lashed out at
the nearest head and felt hard things turn soft beneath his fist. There was blood and teeth
in the air with his second blow, and as the dead heckled him, Dumble tossed manners out
the window and went for the eyes.
There’s a trick to throwing a subtle gouge and Dumble had learned it the hard
way in his teenage years in a scrap with Bobby Sole over a skirt named Petunia: you
make a fist, then straighten your thumb and poke that mid-knuckle of your index finger
forward a touch. Throw that bad boy towards an unsuspecting opponent’s eye and if he
don’t drop, he will at least back the fuck off toot-sweet. Which is exactly how the
Polecat half of the amalgamated fighters reacted.
What followed was a thorough bastardization of the sweet science. Two heads,
four arms, it didn’t matter a damn to Dumble, who fought so filthily, he repented with
each blow struck. He split the single beast back into two. He opened up new orifices on
his foes and swelled existing ones shut. Bones and cartilage snapped like celery. Fixed
parts were beat loose and dangling. Polecat and Peril were rendered post-human by the
fight’s end: alien, misshapen and shocked at the parts of their own insides Dumble
showed them. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 14
The undead audience fell hushed at their fighters’ defeat and slowly lay back down once more. Dumble walked out of the barn, victorious and combat-exhilarated.
The cremated canary halo returned and it sang:
Here I am!
Rock you like a hurricane!
He shook his head and the canaries faded into smoke. He got in the hearse and told Lily to turn the radio back to the gospel station.
#
Meanwhile, back at the chicken-ranch, La Gorda sat atop her daybed throne in the expansive main office of her Putero, sucking the marrow from her nineteenth drumstick in as many minutes. She let out a belch and rang the petite bell she kept at hand, wiping the greasy fingers of her other hand on her flowered muumuu.
Ms. Guiterrez entered immediately, the bun in her hair as tight as her ass, despite the heavy-petting session with Buck the stable-boy, which La Gorda had just interrupted.
The color still high in Ms. Guiterrez’s cheeks, her voice kept its clipped and professional tone: “Yes, ma’am?”
“Mija ,” La Gorda said, “Have one of the boys run down to Hector’s and get me some flautas. I just can’t get full today.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“With guacamole instead of sour cream. Make sure you tell them it’s for me so they use the real guacamole. Not that crap that comes out of—¿cómo se dice? —a caulking gun.”
“Yes, ma’am.” LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 15
“No lettuce.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
La Gorda fetched a sigh. “ ¿Mija? ”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Am I still beautiful?”
Ms. Guiterrez smiled. “Of course you are, ma’am.”
La Gorda sighed again. “ Ay, no sé . There was a time—”
But before La Gorda could begin to properly wax nostalgic, Smitty, Felcher and
Stimey burst in. “La Gorda!” Smitty said, “You gotta help us! There’s—”
Ms. Guiterrez flicked a wrist and an 8-inch butterfly knife appeared between her slender fingers, which she plunged into Smitty’s forehead to the hilt. Smitty dropped like a load, filling his jeans with shit and death.
“Ay, ” said La Gorda wearily.
“How dare you profane this place with that name!” Ms. Guiterrez said. Her eyes burned with the fury known only to big-tittied secretaries. “You filthy, degenerate bowlers will keep a civil tongue in your heads, or I shall personally remove them with an emery board and salad tongs. Are we clear?”
Felcher and Stimey stared at the twitching corpse of Smitty.
“Are we fucking clear!”
Felcher clapped a hand to his mouth and nodded vigorously. He glanced at
Stimey, who was still wide-eyed, and grabbed the back of his head and nodded vigorously for him as well. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 16
“Good.” Ms. Guiterrez folded her arms. “Now, what is so urgent that the three of you would be so forgetful of your manners?”
Felcher kept his hand clapped to his mouth. Stimey finally piped up with, “W-
Well, see it’s like this La—” Stimey caught himself, “La Señora, we was up at Billy’s just now...” and Stimey’s tale rolled forth.
When he was finished, La Gorda looked at Felcher. “This is true, what he say?”
Felcher nodded.
“Ay ,” La Gorda said, “ El viejo loco. He finally lose his mind completely. It’s just
as well. Okay, mija , these nice boys have had a long day. Take them upstairs and get their vergas sucked.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
La Gorda waved a hand at Smitty. “Have Buck come in and clear this away.”
“Oh, yes, ma’am,” Ms. Guiterrez breathed as she yanked her blade from Smitty’s skull.
“And call Brent down here.”
A chink in Ms. Guiterrez’s façade, she grimaced ever so slightly as she said, “Yes, ma’am,” and went out the door, Felcher and Stimey on her heels.
“And where are my fucking flautas!”
#
Brent Weinbach. Orphaned on the streets of Mexicali by a nice German tourist lady who couldn’t be sussed to get an abortion. Found by La Gorda on a shopping trip back when she was mostly mobile. Raised on curdled mother’s milk, off-key narcocorridos and Oedipal wet dreams. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 17
In short, a guy you would cross the street to avoid. And then you’d sell your house and move to Guam.
#
Brent tugged on the sleeves of his threadbare suit jacket as he left the Aces and
Eights card room, tugged on the lapels, and smoothed out his T-shirt, the one with the iron-on that read “U.S. Drinking Team.” From his jeans, he removed a box of toothpicks and set one in the corner of his mouth. Then he almost got run over by a big, black ’56
Cadillac Fleetwood hearse.
The hearse slammed to a halt in the dirt parking lot, its hood ornament just a nuzzle away from Brent’s balls. The dust clouds tickled Brent’s nose. The old man behind the wheel glared at him, but as the dust settled in the waning sunlight, Brent watched as the color drained out of the old man’s face and his eyes bugged from his head.
Brent smirked around his toothpick and strolled around to the passenger’s side window.
“You oughtta watch where I’m goin’, old fella,” Brent said.
The old man said nothing, just kept staring at him, hands locked at ten and two.
His mouth was open just a bit. Brent looked down at the firm little piece in the passenger’s seat. “Hi there,” Brent said.
“Go fuck yourself,” she said.
“But why should I have all the fun?” Brent said and laughed, “Hey, pops, you oughtta keep a tighter leash on your granddaughter here.”
The old man stared. Despite it all, Brent was getting the creeps, not a feeling he was used to. Giving, sure, but not getting. This started to piss him off, a feeling he was LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 18 very much used to, one he relished. He leaned in the window and looked at the old man over the rims of his sunglasses. “You got somethin’ you wanna say to me, daddy-o?”
The old man stared.
“Yeah, I thought not.” He grinned back at the little piece. “You like older men, sugar booger? Hell, I can be as old as you want me to be.”
She fumed silently at him. Normally, Brent would rise to this sort of challenge.
But right now, he was only horny enough to fuck a willing piece. He figured he should lay off the pot, maybe. “Right,” he said, “you two have a good’un.” And then he fucked off into the dusk.
Lily looked over at Dumble. “The fuck was that all about? Why didn’t you feed him his own balls?”
Dumble’s jaw quivered.
“What?” Lily said.
“That was him,” Dumble murmured, “That was the one.”
“One what?”
But Dumble just sat there. Lily had been scared before, had spent a good chunk of her girlhood being scared. But seeing Dumble like this now, the blood of his enemies still fresh on his knuckles, the smell of victory still in the air like napalm, yet he was cowed as a kitten in a kennel. Man, it really pissed her off.
Her slap across his face was like a bullwhip. Dumble’s eyes blurred and then re- focused and the Light poured in again. And the Light said, unto he: “Pull your fucking head out of your ass, and let’s do this already.”
Dumble wisely acquiesced. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 19
#
Once upon a time in Mexico, La Gorda’s boy Brent Weinbach slaughtered musicians all the way from Nuevo Leon to Tijuana. It wasn’t that he didn’t like music— he was actually quite partial to the work of Ronnie James Dio, particularly the early
Rainbow stuff—and it wasn’t that he was assassinating musicians willy-nilly. Brent was on a mission. Kind of a censorship mission, truth be told, though even Tipper Gore might not approve of the methods applied. A mission to stamp out all the mention of La
Gorda from narcocorridos and those who sang of her.
It has been fifteen years since the name La Gorda was sung in a Mexican ballad.
Before that, there were many. Songs of her former beauty. Songs of her drug trafficking days. Songs of her time as an assassin. Songs of her girth. La Gorda liked things kept on the down-low, but grudgingly accepted her musical infamy as tradition. When word of a concept album done in honor of her deeds reached her ears, however, things changed, and Brent was dispatched to kill all involved, along with their families, and any stray artista de la música norteña who dared warble out her name on promise of coin.
Truth be told, La Gorda could not really be blamed for striking out so harshly, as some pretty slanderous things were sung with her name attached, such as this verse, from a particular narco sung by a green velour leisure-suit wearing group by the name of Los
Cochinos del Amor, and loosely translated from the Spanish:
Before she grew so corpulent
And La Gorda became her name
She was a true Mexican beauty
Unfortunately afflicted with genital warts LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 20
Whether or not La Gorda was indeed afflicted with genital warts (I know through unfortunate personal experience that she was) was not the issue. The issue was that it was not to be sung about all over the land of her birth and into her adopted homeland.
Brent spent six months killing Mexican bands and collecting the penises of the band members as warning to any future would-be balladeers: La Gorda can do much, much more than just give you dick lumps. It was on this long mission, some twenty severed dicks in, that Brent had his first encounter with Calvin Dumble.
Even the staunchest followers of Calvin Dumble wonder what exactly drove him to the bunker that Red-scared Daddy Dumble built in the backyard of the family homestead decades earlier. The talk of apocalyptic premonition is fact, but the deeper truth is that the demons Dumble hid from for ten years were his own. The apocalypse he sensed was the collapse of his own mind, identity and sanity, further encouraged by the communion of vodka and bad acid he took down with him in his distressed state. I put myself at risk expounding this theory, and have sequestered myself away from public scrutiny and the arms (lethal or otherwise) of the indoctrinated followers of Rev. Dumble.
And so, with only minor fear of reprisal, I present the tragic secret origin of Calvin
Dumble, until now whispered only amongst bar-dwelling old men over piss-tasting beer and Wild Turkey shots.
Calvin was a young man without faith, despite the religion Daddy Dumble tried to literally beat into him as a boy.
But how could there be a God, an afterlife, when all Calvin saw every day was death and her work laid out at Daddy Dumble’s mortuary? Corpses touched up, wounds covered, in a pathetic attempt to make the dead human one final time? If this method LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 21 couldn’t work for Zsa Zsa Gabor, what hope did the rest of us have? Calvin found it all cruel and sad and he wanted no part of the family business, nor the family faith.
His mother had passed when he was young, his father when Calvin was a man of thirty. Driven by a need to flee and an old-world sense of adventure, Calvin left the
Dumble homestead in the care of his father’s assistant, Tyson Tolard, and took a chunk of his inheritance with him to Mexico.
As it so happens with stubborn men, it takes the love of a stubborn woman to see things more clearly. Her name was Esmerelda, and she was a native of a small town in the state of Guanajuato that for the sake of propriety shall remain nameless. Calvin had come to the town on what he thought was a whim, but later pegged for divine intervention. He was an immediate hit amongst the local señoritas, as the majority of the young male population had fled to work in a chicken-processing plant across the border.
Esmerelda, the fairest daughter of all Guanajuato, ran a sewing co-op, making uniforms for Mexican musicians, including her father, who sang and played a sweet marimba in
Los Cochinos del Amor.
Esmerelda taught Calvin to love the Lord in a way that his father could not. The pair married and gave birth to a daughter, Lucy, who was the first one killed some nine years later when Brent Weinbach came into town with his guns, his dick-cutting knife, and his strict instructions to wipe out all connected to Los Cochinos del Amor.
Calvin saw Brent coming, saw trouble in his beady eyes, saw the jar of dicks under one arm, the .45 in his hand. He saw Brent too late, though, and was unable to do naught but get gut-shot. He was the only town occupant to regain consciousness. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 22
He returned home some months later, having been treated by a doctor from a neighboring town, the ghosts of his dead ever with him. He fired Tyson Tolard, and hid from all but Jesus, for Jesus was all he had left. He emerged transmogrified, a decade older, damaged, seeing things that weren’t there, and with nothing in his heart and mind but a Bible verse. Luke 19:27.
But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them,
bring hither, and slay them before me.
And with Jesus riding shotgun, demons in his crosshairs, Dumble began the slaughter.
We now return to the present...well, the past, but closer to the present than the parts of the tale you just read. There is action coming, so do stick around.
#
The Aces and Eights card room started out as a tin shack on Skidmark Row, where reprobates could play a few hands of stud in out of the sun, on top of a cooler stocked with warm Schlitz and cold comfort. When the owner and founder, Asa “Aces
High” Garrett, was found dead in a bizarre shaving accident, the shack was taken over by two rambler-gamblers named Dennis McPherson and Denny Larabee, referred to collectively as the Dens of Iniquity. Between the two of them, the Dens had enough political clout, stock-piled ammo, and liquid assets to build the Aces and Eights into a three-story gambler’s paradise, from the magnetized one-armed bandits in the basement to the blowjob tournaments on the roof.
As Dumble headed for the entrance, his head began to clear, his eyes began to focus on his mission. His knees still felt hollow and his heart still felt like it was in his LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 23 sinuses, but he forded ahead. The automatic entry doors slid open for him with a polite ping, and a charcoal cloud of cigarette smoke wafted out on an air-conditioned gust.
The ground floor was still a card room, the largest card room in the entire damned land. Tables covered every square inch of the thick carpet, all the way back to the sweeping staircases going up to the 2 nd floor mezzanine. Tables dedicated to every game
imaginable: draw, stud, acey-deucy, three-card brag, strip (singles or couples), hearts,
blackjack, Uno, pai gow, baccarat, faro, teen patti, mille bornes, war, and let it die. Every
single game, except one: a huge banner hung from the ceiling which proclaimed,
“TEXAS HOLD ‘EM IS FOR FRAT BOYS AND OTHER COCKSUCKERS”
As Dumble entered, as he saw the heads of every reprobate and transgressor
swivel in his direction, as each amigo of the Adversary, each buddy of Beelzebub, each
pal of Ba’al rose and began to draw weapons, a smile once again spread across Dumble’s
face. Sure, he’d been thrown a curve in the parking lot just then, but he was still
swinging for the bleachers.
He popped his neck. “Come hither, motherfuckers,” he said.
#
Lily parked the car and listened to the incessant drumming of gunfire from the ground floor. Folks were fleeing the building, but not in the droves she would have guessed. Given that she’d just seen Dumble slip, that for whatever reason he seemed to have an Achilles in his heel, Lily thought she’d have a look around back, make sure he was covered.
A Scarlet Woman’s work is seldom done. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 24
As Lily came up on the rear of the building, there grew a chorus of whines and barks louder and louder. Unbeknownst to Lily or Dumble, tonight there’d been planned a huge dogfight tournament, possibly the largest in the region’s history, a history already fraught with huge dogfight tournaments. A special arena had been erected behind the
Aces and Eights, a chain-link monstrosity designed to keep up to fifty dogs separate in their own runs until the proper switch was thrown. The dogs could see and hate their opponents, but couldn’t lay a tooth or nail on them until the gates were lifted into the canine Thunderdome.
Lily climbed up the side and walked over the pens. Six feet below the soles of her feet, the slobbering maws of the Rotties, Pitties, Dobies, and other savage beasties gnashed up at her, saliva dripping like venom.
Lily put a thoughtful finger on her chin and looked back over her shoulder at the back entrance to the card room. There had to be a control box around here somewhere...
#
The Desert Eagles were empty; the shells were in the car. But the Mag and the sawed-off were still good to go, their barrels warm like a lover’s embrace. The stench of gunsmoke in the room had actually overpowered the smell of Benson & Hedges.
The card room was a sea of corpses and splintered chairs. Blood and gin lapped at Dumble’s ankles as he kicked aside the prostrate husks of the demon-seed he’d dispatched to their filthy overlord. He was making his way back to the opulent staircases by the emergency exit doors, when a warning shot shattered the rubber tree planter in front of him. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 25
“Not another step there, Father,” said Dennis McPherson. Smoke curled from the barrels of his Remington 1740. “We’ve all been done saved ‘round here.”
McPherson aimed and fired again, and Dumble double-backed, propping up the corpse of Bald Abraham for cover.
“Yeah,” said Denny Larabee as he descended the opposite staircase, shots from his Beretta gouging the carpet at Dumble’s feet, “We have guitar mass every Wednesday upstairs in the chapel.” He giggled. “Our Lady of Conceptual Immaculation.” He switched his pistol over to his other hand so he could pick his nose.
“The Dens,” Dumble said and spat. He ditched Bald’s recently ventilated body and pulled a wrecked card table over on its side to deflect Larabee’s coke-addled aim.
He shouted out, “Your iniquity shall spread no further, Dens, not from this day forth.”
“Maybe so,” McPherson said, pausing halfway down the stairs to reload, “but best you can do is halve that spread.”
“See,” Larabee said, stopping level with his partner across the room, about seven stairs up, “We was watching you shoot all these here fish in this here barrel.” He grinned and scratched his ass. Dumble noticed the lump of a tail in Larabee’s cover-alls. “But whose turn is it in the barrel now, padre?” Larabee said.
“Them pretty Eagles’a yers are all spent, Father,” McPherson said and ran a hand through his hair. As long and lustrous as it was, McPherson’s hair could not hide the nubs of his horns from the gospel-sharpened eye of Dumble. “And,” McPherson said,
“we’re betting you can’t hit both’a us afore one’a us hits you.”
“And we is betting men, after all,” Larabee said, giggling as he aimed his gun at
Dumble’s head. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 26
From behind his cover, Dumble looked out at his enemies, surrounding him like assholes will. Dumble held his face to the heavens and loudly declared, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no peckerwoods, for Thou art with me. Thy rod,” Dumble cocked his Magnum, “and Thy staff,” he gripped the sawed- off more tightly, “they comfort me. Thou preparest a shitload of broken card tables before me in the presence of these fuckheads. Thou anointest my head with Ben-Gay.
My flask runneth over.”
Larabee giggled. “Sure is a mouthful, padre,” he said, “Gonna be hard to fit it all on your tombstone.”
“We’ll see it gets done, though,” McPherson said and racked his gun. “Least we can do.”
There was a scratch at the emergency exit.
“Fuck was that?” Larabee said, his voice suddenly a whisper.
The doors flew open, and a snarling canine stampede flooded into the room. Dog flesh whipped past Dumble, fluttering his pants legs and mussing his hair. The thunder of their paws was deafening, drowned out by the dogs’ vengeful howls.
“Holy shit!” Larabee said, as a giant Bullmastiff charged up the stairs at him. She was an old girl, to be put out to pasture after tonight’s planned festivities. But she had plenty of fight left. Her black jowls were pulled back over jagged teeth, her yellow eyes as deadly as her breath.
Larabee got off one wild shot as the Bull clamped her jaws onto his arm, pulling him down the stairs with both their weight. Even in the tumble, the Bull tightened her vice grip until Larabee’s elbow popped like a water balloon, and synovial fluid mixed LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 27 with her drool. Larabee had just enough time to scream before five or six more dogs began to shred him like a hen in a thresher.
McPherson managed to blow the face off a Pit Bull from where he was standing, but before he could pump the Remington again, a Cane Corso the size of a pony leapt up at him. The big fella had no ears on his massive head, but a huge scar that ran across his brow, like Frankenstein’s guard dog. McPherson’s eyes bulged as the Corso sailed through the air at him, mouth first, and wrapped his jaws around McPherson’s throat.
When McPherson landed on the stairs, he felt his spine snap just before the Corso, with one twist of his powerful head, tore McPherson’s throat out.
The rest of the dogs, after making a quick search for Milk-Bones amongst the corpses, all fled out the front door and into the night. Dumble turned as Lily strolled in through the big double doors, a very self-satisfied look on her face.
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,” Dumble said.
Lily looked down at her tits. “Well, I’ve never heard ‘em called that before, but it’ll do.”
#
A romantic interlude.
Of sorts.
Ms. Guiterrez was power-suit disheveled and straw-coated, yet every strand of her black hair was still miraculously chop-stick fixed in place. She nestled her cheek against
Buck’s furry chest. In this position, she could smell the funk wafting from under his arms, but that was fine. More than fine. She liked a man who smelled like a man.
Deodorants repulsed her—they were the mark of a world divorced from all primal scent- LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 28 codes, a secret, ancient language lost to people’s fixation with clothes and the belief that the natural odor of the body was somehow abhorrent. True, Ms. Guiterrez was forced to wear a suit as La Gorda’s chief of staff, and the fat bitch had cottoned to the lipstick lesbian look, but Ms. Guiterrez quietly rebelled by never wearing any undergarments.
Noticeably jiggling as she moved, she subsequently earned the nickname of Maxicans
amongst La Gorda’s kitchen staff, who cooked up even more lewd fantasies about her
than they did hot meals for La Gorda. Ms. Guiterrez was every bullshit sexy
librarian/secretary/teacher fantasy stuffed into a buttonhole-stretched cream-colored
blouse, but the only man at La Gorda’s chicken-ranch to ever pop those buttons open was
stable-boy Buck.
Aside from his odor, Buck’s great fortune derived from the fact that he was
broad-shouldered and barrel-chested. His physique was a throwback: all chest and lats.
He was a hirsute, tattooed Charles Atlas, complete with leopard-print bikini briefs pulled
up near his belly button. Along with Atlas, his body recalled the most powerful of
luchadors and, for as long as she could recall, Ms. Guiterrez had had it bad for luchadors.
She had been brought up around the sport of Lucha Libre, which goes some way
in explaining her predilection for sweaty men. Her father was noted rudo Mascara Negro,
a heel so hated that he was stabbed to death in the parking lot after unmasking his wildly
popular opponent, Tito Titan, one fall into a two-out-of-three falls match. Some say that
the near-riot that followed was caused not by the unmasking itself, but more by the fact
that Tito was not only hideously ugly but recognized as the son of an infamous serial
rapist. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 29
The dreams of señoritas shattered nationwide, Mascara Negro paid the price: a butterfly knife buried in his ribs as he lay slumped across the hood of his purple 1958
Impala, a death soundtracked by nearby drunken mariachis. Making matters worse, the unmasking itself was an accident. Tito Titan neglected to tie the laces of his mask tight enough. It simply popped off as he slid out of a particularly strong Mascara Negro headlock.
Mascara Negro’s murder was never solved.
His daughter, the eight-year-old Ms. Guiterrez, was canny enough even then to dispose of her knife thoughtfully.
As for Buck, well, his origin is not so interesting. Conceived at Penetration Point by a john with a foot fetish and a hooker with retro size eleven Natural Comfort polka dot clogs, he was what he was: he groomed La Gorda’s equines and thanked Jesus every night for his musk and 1950s buffness that afforded him the opportunity to fuck
Maxicans against the hay bales nightly.
After what Ms. Guiterrez just told him, however, Buck took a long look at his lover’s cooch, upskirt-style, for what he feared may be the last time. He contemplated asking her to run off with him all romantic-like. He kept the notion to himself, though.
Ms. Guiterrez was ornery, but she was loyal to La Gorda.
“What are we going to do?” he said, “If Dumble is as unhinged as those fucking bowlers say—”
“Buck, dear Buck, our fates lie in the sweating, unwashed palms of Brent
Weinbach. As much as I hate to admit it, there is no clammier clasp I would prefer my fate to be in.” LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 30
“That motherfucker. I don’t think he’s as tough as he makes out.”
“Have you seen his jar of Mexican penises?”
Buck blinked.
Ms. Guiterrez picked straw off her suit jacket. “I thought not. One night he told me he wanted to motorboat mis pinches melones and tried to impress me by showing me
the jar. He is a filthy, cock-collecting, cologne-wearing degenerate. But he is not to be
fucked with. I called him, and he is currently on his way to stop Dumble before he gets
to us here.”
Buck opened his mouth, but she put a finger to his lips.
“Mark my words, mi gran cojedor sudoroso . There will soon be a wrinkled,
white, old-man pecker floating around in that jar, butting heads with all those norteños .”
Buck smiled. That was good enough for him. Long as he himself didn’t have to peep the jar, it was all cool.
They went to kiss, but Ms. Guiterrez broke it off mid-smooch.
She heard it. A tiny bell tinkling faintly, incessantly, along with the call:
“I still have no fucking flautaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas!”
#
Brent was too late to catch Dumble at the Aces and Eights. The place looked like it belonged in some broken-down, shot-up shithole country he’d seen on TV. Bosnia or
Liberia or some place far away and beneath the concern of such a baaaad motherfucker.
He felt a pang of regret at the loss of the joint. He’d once placed first there in a particularly competitive BJ competition—receiving, not giving, of course—after holding out for four hours, thirty-two minutes and six seconds. An impressive feat made all the LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 31 more so by the fact that the mouth wrapped around his member belonged to Japanese suck-fuck porn queen Sugoi Manko, brought in on the sly by the Dens to ruin his form and lower his odds.
He fired up his ’67 Camaro, a gift from La Gorda after his successful Mexico mission fifteen years earlier, and rolled on down Skidmark Row. His jaw rested on the floormat at the things he saw.
Manny’s Mongoloid Stud Farm: razed to the ground. Naked, well-hung, special- ed dudes, free at last, whooping at the destruction, running in circles and high-fiving.
One even took a mighty piss on Manny’s mashed-up corpse.
Tommy O’Fishfry’s Cook-Your-Own-Crack Mansion: clearly Molotov cocktailed.
Kitsch Narco-Deco ornaments ablaze. Bits of burnt body twitching on the front lawn.
Flames lapping up so high, Brent figured they were singeing the stars.
Brent drove on. Skidmark Row had gone all disaster movie. Dead folk abounded.
Those that weren’t dead or shot were huddled by the side of the road, weeping. Brent felt pretty dumb. He’d known there was something about the old man in the hearse, his sexy bit of jailbait trim beside him. He looked so... beat , though, and she so fine, Brent never gave Dumble a second thought.
He patted his dick jar, buckled into the passenger seat beside him, and forced himself calm with images of his slaughtered.
He said aloud, “My dick-cutting knife is freshly stropped. My mind is empty save for thoughts of an old preacher’s death and the protection of my adopted mama and the taking of that blonde bit of nasty.” He placed two fingers to his mouth, kissed them, and patted the jar again. “Let’s do this shit.” LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 32
He took a glance at the ruined Battle Midget Bar as he drove slowly past. Little folk with hands taped up for a fight lay scattered outside like toppled over tough-guy garden gnomes. He caught a ghostly after-image of ferocious violence, like death’s slipstream. He saw Dumble swinging the butt of an old sawed-off, a horde of midgets rabidly pawing at him like he was a chocolate-covered Salma Hayek. It was brutal.
He suddenly needed to take a dump.
#
The showdown, when it came forty-five minutes later, took place at Jerry
Mallman’s place. Jerry, a rabid necrophiliac, specialized in the fine arts of grave-robbing and lived in a small, ruined gothic church bordering on a small cemetery, which had known neither God nor gospel since 1899.
Brent arrived in time to see Mallman come crashing through a stained glass window, his head twisted backwards. Brent saw Lily giggle and clap. He saw Dumble, stony-faced, but battered and surely spent. Brent had his moment and should have taken his shot, but the carnage littering Skidmark Row had unnerved him. He was a man who killed at the instruction of his adopted mother. He had butchered bodies, taken grisly trophies, mown down women and children. But what Dumble had done...the old man was a maestro of mayhem, a Van Gogh of violence. Brent was simply awed.
Framed by shards of shattered multi-colored glass, Dumble looked up and met the eyes of the man who had ruined him a decade and a half earlier. His own resolve buckled, his faith slipped. But he managed to grab Lily and duck out of the way of Brent’s first shot, which was about as tentative as a hurtling chunk of lead gets.
Brent yelled, “Fuck!” and peppered off shots wildly. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 33
Inside, Dumble and Lily huddled together on the floor as bullets picked off the incongruous Polynesian furnishings of Mallman’s abode. Dumble squeezed his eyes shut.
Lily punched him in the shoulder.
“That’s the cocksucker from earlier, huh? That preppie-lookin’ douchebag who turned you into a gutless pussy with just a glance from his shit-brown peepers.”
Dumble rocked silently. Lily fumed like Mt. Estrus about to blow.
“He’s fuckin’ shootin’ at us, man!”
She reached into Dumble’s waistband and pulled a gleaming .38 from down near the crack of the old man’s ass. “Fuck it. Like my mama said, behind every good man, there’s a crackshot stripper on the rag.”
Lily came up shooting. Dumble opened his eyes to see the Light screaming and
transmogrified into full-blown muzzle flare.
He sat up and saw the thing that haunted him for all this time scrambling for cover
with his long, pitch-fork tail between his legs.
#
Behind a nearby tombstone, grave dirt pretty freshly disturbed, Brent blinked
blood from his eyes, trickling down from his bullet-grazed forehead. He carefully set
down his trophy jar and took stock of just how mighty a fuck-up he’d made.
He had his shot and didn’t take it. He’d been sucked into Dumble’s myth, his
aura, when in reality, the man was just ancient and chickenshit. Brent saw Dumble’s
eyes open wide with fear as they met his own, just as they had in the Aces and Eights
parking lot. Meanwhile, the chick-stick was the heart and the moxie of the team, coming
at him like a Fury riding the cotton pony. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 34
Brent closed his eyes and wiped at the blood pouring down his head. When he opened them, looming over him he saw a beat-up, silver-haired man unclipping his
Charlton Heston Moses cufflinks and rolling up his sleeves.
Dumble said, “Boy, this has been a long time coming.”
#
A pep-talk was what had been required, and Lily delivered it with evangelistic gusto and dock-worker profanity.
“I don’t know what’s between you and that fuckin’ split-ended nut pube, but he looked just like a man to me, and not much of one at that. You done killed far worse than him tonight. You littered Skidmark Row with the corpses of the wicked and the blood of the damned. So get your fucking God-fearin’ ass up and you go out back, circle round to where he is and make him a fuckin’ dead man.”
Lily glowed so bright and hot at this moment that she induced in Dumble a flashback like a strobe-seizure. In pulsing image-bursts, he glimpsed a gap-toothed grin, a clammy sheen like frog skin, that fucking “U.S. Drinking Team” iron-on. Dumble had himself a revelation: there was no demonic aura around Brent Weinbach; he was like
Jason Priestly gone to seed. He was nothing but a mean little orphan with a furiously itchy trigger-finger running lawless and godless upon this post-apocalyptic land.
Another epiphany: it was more than just revenge unclaimed for the slaying of his kin.
Brent Weinbach was the Anti-Dumble.
And this could not stand.
LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 35
#
For years afterward, from one generation to the next, the tale was told of the fight that night, Dumble vs. Weinbach, one fall, winner take all-or-nothing. In hushed tones was the battle spoke of, how windows rattled as far away as Arkadelphia, how the moon had been spattered with blood and spittle. How the earth had not trembled beneath the feet of two such titans since the time Paul Bunyan had gotten really drunk and tried to put the wood to Babe the blue ox. How the sun itself had feared to rise until it was sure the fight had petered out, leaving Skidmark Row in utter darkness for over two weeks.
This, of course, was all total bullshit.
Dumble pounded the living fuck outta that psycho, and within twenty minutes had reduced Brent Weinbach, once the scourge of the Southwest, to a poorly dressed pile of tears and snot and impotence.
And God damn, it felt fucking good.
#
Lily watched to see that Dumble had the situation well in hand before hopping into Brent’s Camaro and hightailing it down Skidmark Row to La Gorda’s Putero. The neon sign on the roof was visible from blocks away: the name “La Gorda’s” lighting up letter by letter, bookended with fluorescent figures humping the night away. Their thrusts left trails burned on the retina.
From all appearances, it was business as usual at La Gorda’s. The parking lot was full to capacity, the license plates on the cars announced visitors from Alaska to Florida,
La Gorda’s being renowned from coast to coast for the finest cunt this side of Heaven. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 36
But the only heaven-side cunt La Gorda had to worry about tonight was headed for the front door of the Putero, a freshly loaded Desert Eagle in either hand.
Lily kicked in the front door like she’d seen done on Cops so many times. The spacious waiting room was filled with oily johns, squeezed into their best suits like their dicks were going to prom. At the sight of this wild blonde, armed to the well-capped teeth, they all took a likely powder, the négligée-sporting reception girls on their heels.
“La Gorda!” Lily hollered, “Come out and face me, you heifer!”
“Who dares!” came a voice from a darkened doorway. “Who dares address the proprietress of this establishment in such an insolent manner?” The owner of the voice stepped forward into the low light of the foyer, a caramel-colored business-lady type, all done up like some Mexican Nina Hartley or some shit. The size of her rack gave Lily a quick twinge of jealousy despite herself, but she kept a wary eye on the butterfly knife that Latina Hartley gripped in one slender hand.
“I dare, sweetmeat,” Lily said with a sneer. “You go and tell your boss that her boy done fucked up good. That if he’s lucky, there’ll be enough of him left to cremate.
You broads underestimated the good Reverend Calvin Dumble, and now you’re gonna live to regret it.”
Ms. Guiterrez’s eyes widened, and not just at the fact that this tart had actually uttered that cliché with a straight face. “You lie,” she said.
Lily reached into her pocket with some difficulty, trying to keep from blowing her own knee off, and removed a bunch of keys. She lobbed them at Ms. Guiterrez’s feet.
Ms. Guiterrez looked down at the key ring: a purple rabbit’s foot, a picture of La
Gorda circa the late ‘70s, and a bottle opener that said “World’s #1 Grandpa!” Yes, those LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 37 were Brent’s keys all right. And if this...this girl had them, then the rest of what she’d said was true. And so they were all more well fucked than the Putero’s most satisfied customer.
Ms. Guiterrez dropped her knife and ran back to La Gorda’s main office. Lily followed, chuckling, her guns ready for business.
Lily almost chuckled out the other side of her face when she finally laid eyes on
La Gorda. The office was ankle-deep with wrappers and bags from every fast-food joint imaginable, even places like White Castle and Hardee’s, places that didn’t even have franchises this far west.
But even more impressive was the sight of La Gorda herself. Lily had of course heard of the legendary girth of the woman, but La Gorda had not been seen publicly since the heralded Jenny Craig Wars of 1983. The daybed upon which the woman (or did she qualify for the plural “women” at this point?) was folded nearly in half under her weight, like an old cartoon race-horse about to be sent to the glue factory. The flowered muumuu draped over the massive Mexicana gangstress could be used on the Goodyear blimp
while it was in storage.
La Gorda is a hefty woman, is the point here.
“Oh, there you are, mija ,” she said when she saw Ms. Guiterrez. “Are my flautas
here?”
“Ma’am, I have some terrible news.”
“¡Ay, dios mío! Are they no have guacamole again?”
“No, ma’am, it’s not that, it’s—”
“Sour cream is okay if is all they have, it’s just it gives me the farts, that’s all.” LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 38
“No, ma’am, it’s—”
“But no lettuce!”
“Ma’am!” Ms. Guiterrez said, “Brent is dead!”
“¿Que?”
“And that crazy preacher man is probably on his way here right now to—to do
God-knows-what to us all!”
“Oh, that,” La Gorda said with a wave of her hand. “I know. I hear the girl.”
Ms. Guiterrez flushed. “Well—well, what are we going to do?”
La Gorda sighed. “I always know this day will come.” She flipped open a control panel next to her daybed.
There was a large, shiny, cherry-red button. A peeling decal beneath it read: Self-
Destruct.
“Oh, shit,” Lily said.
“Te amo, mija ,” La Gorda said, “but the good Reverend Calvin Dumble can suck
my fat clit in Hell.”
Ms. Guiterrez, under her breath, from trembling lips, said, “ Papi.”
La Gorda pushed the button.
#
Dumble grabbed Brent by the lapels and hauled him up. Dumble’s forearms were
slick with sweat and caked with graveyard dirt. His blood pounded in his ears. Brent
hung from his grip like a CPR dummy. Blood and mucous smeared his face, his smirk
almost literally wiped off his visage. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 39
“All this time,” Dumble said quietly, almost to himself, “all these years living in fear of spindly little toe-rag like you. And ‘cause of what? A lucky shot. ‘Cause you saw me before I saw you.” He pulled Brent closer. Brent whimpered, like the old man was about to breathe fire on him. “Well, hear this,” Dumble said. “I see you now, you abomination.” Dumble picked up Brent’s dick jar.
“Prepare to meet your unholy maker.”
But Hell had already broken loose down the street.
There was an explosion of sound that rocked Dumble even these few blocks away.
La Gorda’s Putero was engulfed in flames, the neon figures topping her sign melting into hot pink squiggles.
Dumble looked around for Lily, but his eyes only told him what the icy feeling in his gut already knew.
He dropped the jar of penes, shattering it. The flaccid scraps of flesh lay there in broken glass and preservative. Then he dropped Brent, who landed broken-face first in his newly-freed collection of dead johnsons.
“Lily,” Dumble whispered to the cold graveyard.
He ran the three blocks to La Gorda’s.
#
Dumble could feel the heat from the flames up the block. What girls and johns were able were fleeing the inferno on foot or by car. Dumble tried to breach the front door but was held back by the panicked crowd and the wall of heat, which dried his eyes before the tears could even form. Dumble, the evening of destruction finally catching up with him, let go. He rode the flow of scattering humanity. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 40
Deposited upon a concrete parking slab, Dumble sat and watched the Putero burn.
The stream of people fleeing dwindled to a trickle, and he did not see Lily anywhere among them.
All these years. Gone. Wasted. When Dumble had been consumed with boredom, with bullshit ennui, he’d blown town until he found meaning. Esmerelda.
Lucy. Life, not death.
But death had caught up with him. Death had stolen his family. So he’d spent fifteen years hunting death down until he’d finally caught up with her.
Bullshit. He’d spent the past fifteen years the way he’d spent his whole life: running away. Running away from home. From Daddy Dumble. Then, from his dead family, the insufferable guilt. He’d tried to paint it as piety, as duty to his God. But he was nothing more than a giant fucking coward, hiding behind the hem of the robe of his
Creator. And on his Holy Quest to prove he was not as big a coward as he actually was, he’d gone and gotten Lily killed. Lily, the one blooming flower in this miserable desert.
Lily.
Dumble wept.
“Whaddaya cryin’ about?” a voice croaked.
Lily had dragged herself all the way out to the parking lot. Her legs splayed out uselessly behind her as she dragged them, broken and bloody over the asphalt. A collapsing roof beam had all but crushed her lower half, and blood dribbled down her chin as she fell, spent, no longer even able to keep herself up on her elbows. LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 41
Here, Dumble thought. Here is a second chance. He rushed to Lily’s side. He found a crushed beer can with some Miller Lite still in the bottom. He quickly made the sign of the cross over it and sprinkled it on his desert flower.
Lily coughed up some more blood, the copper stink of it thick in her nose and now mixed with the odor of stale beer. She forced her heavy eyelids apart and watched as Dumble prayed over her.
“Lord,” sayeth he, “she whom you love is all fucked up. This fucked-up-ness is not unto death; it is for the glory of God. So that this son of a bitch here,” jabbing a thumb to his chest, “may be glorified by the means of it.”
Lily felt a coldness begin to seep over her legs. She tried to ask for some water, but all she could taste was her own blood. Her eyelids began putting on the pounds.
“Father,” Dumble cried to the Heavens, “I thank Thee that Thou hast heard me. I know that Thou hearest me always.” He sniffled, a line of snot on his upper lip. “But I have said this on account of the fact that I’m a no-account motherfucker with a brain addled by junk pharmaceuticals and a heart ravaged by the devils of the wilderness. Do not, O Lord, do not pluck this Lily and keep her to Thine breast. As Thine humble servant, I beg of Thee. So little fight is left in these old bones, and though I deserve no better fate, have pity on Thine useless, sack-of-shit, to-the-curb bum of a servant. For she embodies the strength I so require to do Thine work on this here rotted Earth.”
Dumble lowered his head. “Lily,” he whispered, “Come back.”
And as his tears shed onto Lily’s face, Lily saw the Light spread outward from his silver crown, filling her eyes, her head, filling her mind, her soul. And she felt the warmth creep back into her legs and strength into her spirit. As she heard the thunderous LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 42 charge of the host of Heaven as it descended to assist them in their work, their most holy work, Lily began to rise to fight once again at Dumble’s side.
Then it turned out all the light and noise was just news helicopters.
“Fuck,” she said as she sank back to the ground. “Nope, it didn’t take. You’re gonna have to get me to a hospital, man.”
#
Three months later, Lily was wheeled out to the curb in front of Our Lady of the
Eternal HMO. A shiny, newly-waxed ’56 Fleetwood Cadillac hearse awaited her there.
Dumble helped her gingerly out of the wheelchair and into the shotgun seat.
Lily took the new pair of Ray-Bans off the dash and set them gently on her face.
“So, where to now?”
“Well,” Dumble said as he got in behind the wheel, “to put it bluntly, you and me are about to rush in to where angels fear to tread.”
Lily arched an eyebrow. “That a fact?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dumble said and turned the key. The Fleetwood fired up with a throaty roar. Dumble put on his own shades. “That La Gorda sure thinks she pulled a fast one on us by killing herself. And now she’s sure as sheep shit living it up even further down south.”
Lily smiled. “Mexico.”
“Nope,” Dumble said, “Even further.”
“Um,” Lily said, “South America?”
“Nope.”
“Um...” LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 43
“Where we’re goin’ ain’t on no map, Lily. And it’s even hotter there than in this here desert. You savvy?”
Lily thought for a minute, and then a slow grin spread across her face. “I savvy.”
“But you and me gotta make a real important pit stop first.”
The banks of the Rio Felipe were far from scenic. But what with all the detergents dumped in here along with the raw sewage, Dumble figured they about evened each other out enough for his and Lily’s needs. Lily, still in the starched white hospital gown, followed him down to the water, her exposed buttocks revealing no shame (and with a set like that, really, what was there to be ashamed of?).
The brackish green waters parted grudgingly as the Reverend Dumble and his holy piece, Lily Mudge, stepped into the river. Without a word, Dumble placed his hand on the small of Lily’s back, the other behind her head, and eased her down into the drink.
The water washed over her face.
He brought Lily back up to the surface, and she coughed and sputtered a bit. But she smiled up at him. Dumble said, “Repeat after me, sugar:
“Come to Him and receive His light!”
Lily dutifully repeated.
“I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall be ever in my mouth.”
(Lily’s lips curled into a playful smile at this last.)
“Let my soul glory in the Lord; the lowly will hear me and practically shit their britches.
“Look to Him that you may be radiant with joy, and your face may not blush with shame.” LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN by ASHLEY & CALLAWAY 44
(Now Dumble felt it difficult to keep the smile from his face as he uttered the next words.)
“Taste and see how good the Lord is; happy the person who takes refuge in Him.”
Lily repeated this and said, “Y’know, we’re gonna just have to do this all over again.”
Dumble frowned. “Huh?”
“Dumble,” Lily said, pleasantly exasperated, “I been in that hospital three months now.” She grabbed his crotch. “Now I wanna taste and see how good the Lord really is.”
“Um, uh, um...”
Lily squeezed just a bit more. “Come to me and receive my light, Calvin.”
And so he did.
END
Dumble and Lily will be back in:
Your Pretty Face Is Going to
HELL!