Jeff Jacobson - Foodchain

Until finally, inevitably, he went to answer the door, expecting pizza, and found the two quiet gentlemen instead. They wore expensive suits. Frank was wearing boxers and one sock.

He carried a half-empty bottle of Appleton Estate.

They carried revolvers.

* * * * *

Both suits were roughly six or seven sizes too large. Frank felt like a ten-year-old dressing up in his father’s clothes. Although, he reflected, this wasn’t really at all like his father’s suit. His father had been tall and painfully thin, like Abraham Lincoln, except slouched and without the beard; his father shaved twice a day. He was a preacher and he believed ; every moment on this Earth was a test from the Holy Spirit.

His father had handled swamp rattlesnakes in a large shack filled with half-burnt pews stolen from other churches, sliding his hands slowly around, caressing two or three snakes at a time, as more rattlesnakes and cottonmouths slithered around his feet. A bunch of desperate people surrounded Frank’s father and the snakes, all of ’em leaning into it, clapping too quickly, eyes wide and dull, singing kinda’ low, while Grandma slapped her upright piano and moaned a little now and then.

* * * * *

He found a map under the driver’s seat and figured out he was in the high desert mountains of central Nevada. He headed north. The shoes didn’t fit any better than the suit; in fact, they fit worse, so Frank drove barefoot. News of the zoo would have probably reached Castellari by now, so he couldn’t head south, back to Las Vegas. They had his picture, and in Las Vegas you couldn’t stick your hand in your pocket to scratch your balls without two or three surveillance cameras catching you. He couldn’t head west either; California was full of lying fucks who would happily call Castellari for the slightest hint of a reward.

Frank hit I-80 with an empty stomach and an emptier gas tank. He turned west, towards Reno. Nearly four hours had passed since he’d gone for a dip in the alligator tank. He needed cash. Quickly and quietly. Gas stations and convenience stores were out; that was for guys with brain damage, guys with PCP habits bigger than Texas, guys who thought shooting the camera would wreck the videotape.

More than anything, he needed rest, so he took the next off-ramp. It curled down into a low gully filled with tumbleweeds. He followed the narrow road until a sagging pole barn loomed up ahead in the darkness. He found a dark place to park behind the barn and killed the engine. For a while, he just sat still and listened to the dull roar of the freeway, watching the distant headlights scatter shadows across the hills.

* * * * *

Frank had been to Jamaica once, with a filthy rich widow who owned dozens of racehorses. She’d wanted a “friend” to go along. What the hell, she paid a lot. He fell in love with the island, and all he wanted out of life was to simply make enough money to buy himself a little concrete shack, right off of a palm-strewn beach, maybe pick up a sweet and sassy little Jamaican honey. A place where he could lay in the sun, swim in the ocean, and quietly drink himself to death in peace.

He bounced around the radio for a while, but couldn’t concentrate on anything. He closed his eyes, but the surging, boiling water of the alligator tank kept leaking out. Teeth slammed together, tails slapped metal, and segmented white bellies flashed in yellow light as they rolled and rolled and rolled—

Something clamped itself around his right ankle.

Frank screamed and flinched awake in the driver’s seat of the long black car and found his ankle wedged underneath the brake pedal. He jerked his knees angrily up to the steering wheel and sat up. His stomach growled impatiently. But he could handle that. It was the irritating, thirsty itch in the back of his mind that really bothered him.

* * * * *

He headed west again. He needed a place to clean himself up. He pulled into a nearly empty rest stop and parked at the far end. The place smelled of diesel and dog shit. An open area full of maps, brochures, and pay phones split the building in half; the women’s room on one side, men’s on the other. He counted three trucks in the parking lot and no cars.

He waited a while and was just about to meander on over to the building and see if they had any vending machines with food, when a semi hissed itself to a stop in the truck lot. Frank kept still, watching through the rearview mirror. A man jumped out of the cab, stretched, and walked slowly to the men’s room.

Twenty minutes later the guy was still inside.

Frank got tired of waiting. Maybe the guy had stomach flu or something. He slid the tire iron up the inside of the suit’s right sleeve, up along his forearm and curled his fingers around the lower half of the L.

He climbed out of the car, tire iron hot and tight in his fist. He clomped across the parking lot as fast as possible in the loose shoes. It would have been easier barefoot. But he didn’t want any unnecessary attention and since a guy wearing an ill-fitting black suit and oversize shoes didn’t seem as strange as being barefoot, he slogged forward, keeping his toes flexed so the shoes wouldn’t fall off.

Frank stepped into the light in the middle of the building, scanning for food. There was a vending machine for soda, but that was all. No candy bars, no chips. Not even those bags of fake health mixes, with chunks of petrified nuts and dried fruit that tasted like horse shavings. He stopped for a moment, watching the snoring trucks and listening intently. Except for the fast food wrappers dancing in the wind, nothing moved.

Frank stepped inside the men’s restroom.

Searing white fluorescent light stung his eyes. Bleached gray tiles covered the floors. The stalls waited on his left. On his right, the sinks and reflective metal mirrors. Two air hand dryers. The place smelled burnt, not only through the temperature from the desert air and those hand dryers, but chemically as well.

One of the stall doors was shut.

Frank skied across the tiles to the nearest sink. He twisted the handle, and as water hit the porcelain, he bent over to see what waited under the closed door.

A pair of gray snakeskin cowboy boots.

Frank splashed water on his face, then bent and drank deeply. The water tasted foul and smelled of sulfur, but since he hadn’t had any liquid at all in over eight hours, he didn’t mind. He gulped it down, pausing only to suck in a quick breath now and then.

The stall door swung in, slowly. A voice, rough and low, whispered, “Hey man. Hey. Look at me.”

The guy on the toilet was close to Frank’s age, maybe low thirties, sandy beard, wearing a Mack Truck cap, and a plaid western cut long-sleeve shirt. His jeans were bunched around his ankles, and his right hand was stroking his erect dick.

Frank slowly straightened, wiping the water away from his lips with his left hand, keeping his right hand with the tire iron hanging loose at his side. “I’m sorry?”

He stepped out of the black shoes. The tile was cold and clammy beneath his feet.

“Look at this, man.” The breathing and stroking grew faster. “Look at it. Yes…You like it, don’t ya? You like my cock. I can tell.”

“Yeah,” Frank agreed as he took three quick steps towards the stall and brought the tire iron down on the trucker’s head before the man could even let go of his dick. The iron bar hit his skull with an unsatisfying, brittle thud. So Frank hit the guy again, cracking the corner of the L into the trucker’s nose. The guy finally let go of his dick and instead of protecting his head, went for his jeans. Frank cracked him a few more times and the guy twitched and flopped for a second or two like a fish on a flat rock, but eventually he stopped trying to move at all.