The Wrath of Buddy McLean

Something was disconnected in Max’s brain that had never been disconnected before.  The break created a blind paranoia.  Frightful without reason he strained to peer through his chemical shroud long enough to assure his safety.  Wrestling with neurotransmitters, using the whole of his mental strength he pulled his hallucination apart like webby, patterned sheets hanging before his eyes and tried desperately to comprehend his immediate surroundings.  In that instance of lucid sobriety his fears were compiled: 

There was an ocean.  A violent storm, constantly flashing and beating against the water was stirring massive waves that sprayed and soaked the dock on which he stood.  He made three black figures—one of them female—draped in ponchos trying to smoke cigarettes, leaning against a long, grey car.  He squinted to find a glowing hole in the car’s side—his seat.

Then his memory failed him.  He could see their faces in every flash, and could infer in his haze that he had ridden with them, but their identities were lost among his strange and swirling thoughts. “Friends?” he muttered.  One of the ponchos floated over to him, trading its smoking filter for an armful of tackle on the dock.

Max’s head was pounding.  He sat in a puddle and wrapped his fingers around his face.  They turned to a bandage, gently encompassing his head and chin, circling around five times before neatly pinning itself below his ears.  A second bandage forming on his leg confused him—it hadn’t hurt until now.

Two bare white hands were extending from makeshift sleeves torn into a black garbage bag.  They were busy wrapping Max’s legs—tying knots that dug and burned into the skin of his ankles through his dripping denim pants.  A girlish sob echoed in his right ear while another of the silhouettes hovered towards him, struggling to carry an enormous, mussel-encrusted rock. 

The mollusks sucked and spit at the air around them, chanting a silent mantra, coaxing Max deeper into his psychosis.  Then the team of shells—boulder in tow—flew gracefully into the water.  Max followed them with his eyes, and then with his feet.  His head slapped noisily against the coarse edge of the dock before bouncing with the rest of him into the sea.

He forced his eyes open and saw only two green moons dancing in pieces above him, becoming smaller and less distinguishable as he descended.  He closed his eyes and took a fierce inward breath.

Max met his life’s love at his uncle’s barn raising.  She skipped through the freshly painted doors alone when the beer was half gone.  Her red shirt wrapped snugly around her small breasts and flat midriff.  At a profile her top blended perfectly by way of a long stretch of tan belly into her skin-tight culottes.  Her belt was an afterthought—it hung loosely about her waist like the strap of a holster.  Instead, her pants were immobilized by an invitingly round backside.

Flushed with primal impulse, he took position behind her as she sipped warm beer from a green glass bottle.  He ground his pelvis into her back pockets while holding her hips and speaking softly into her right ear.

In his bedroom they would smoke cigarettes and long glass pipes before he would press her face into his pillow and slowly gratify himself inside her.

When she resisted, he dripped chemicals into their beers.  They would laugh psychotically together and make love among kaleidoscopic walls and glowing, glowering televisions and lights.

When their lifestyle drove them to poverty, he would sneak out in black hooded jackets and raid his family’s purses, wallets, safes and cars.  He came quietly and left noisily, always breaking a window or door before his escape.  He kept the ring of keys behind his television and thousands of crisp dollars beneath his mattress.

Her face was red one day.  He knew that something was wrong.  “What the fuck is your problem?”  He shook her soft right arm and brought her to tears.  Her face became redder and wet.  “Why ya cryin’, eh?  You got somethin’ to tell me?”  She was sobbing and pulling away from his grasp.  “Who ya been fuckin’ behind my back, eh?  Tell me, ya whore! Tell me who he is!”

“No, Maxie—stop it!” she sniffed.  “I’m pregnant, Maxie—we’re gonna have a baby!”  He let go of her arm and smile crept briefly onto her tear-soaked lips.  Max’s stomach was cramping.  His eyes widened and focused.  His face drained to a stale white.  He ran away.

He dialed a payphone and sat to wait at the pier.  A half-hour later his hits were there—four dollars for four.  He tongued them all and wandered back to his complex to search his stash for more.  When he reached the door, the drug set in.  The apartment was haunted with vividly streaming, dismal colors.  The furniture and walls were all bending upwards.  He traced their pattern and heard a swelling of resonant infant shrieks pouring through the ceiling.  He staggered the flight upstairs and budged his bedroom door open to find the mother of someone else’s child sleeping in his bed.

Wildly he flailed at her bulging stomach.  She woke up screaming and coughing and trying to get away.  He held her down and glared at his work with giant pupils, striking her until she bled.  Grinning and satisfied he bolted outside and into the woods.

He staggered through the forest, confused.  Trees were forming tall maze walls that led him to traps.  A relentless drizzle was slowly drenching his shirt, matting the curls on his head into a wet dangling mop.  His sneakers were caked in grey muck.  The soft ground beneath him sucked hungrily at his feet.  His vision tunneled and blurred.  There were three glowing circles beyond the treetops ahead.  He trudged towards them, his body lifeless aside from its mechanical legs. 

He stumbled over a helix of unseen branches, falling face-first onto cut, wet grass.  He winced and struggled to push himself upright when the lantern’s glow above him darkened.

“Back for more, you fuckin’ scumbag?”  Two faceless figures dressed in plastic loomed over Max’s splayed frame.  He managed to get himself onto his knees.  They pressed deep into the mud and stabilized his shaking upper body.  Then something cracked against the side of his face.  His head flopped onto the grass and his body went limp.

When his eyes creaked open and retuned him to consciousness, his hands were tied and resting on his lap.  He was laying flat on a clear plastic sheet, staring at the rafters of a barn.  His uncle’s hunting partner was there, gripping a twelve-gauge tightly with gloved hands, a cigarette hanging from his lips. His uncle’s gardener was in the corner, speaking quietly into a telephone.

The hunter spit out his cigarette and ground it into the dirt floor with the toe of his boot.  “’ey Gwen—you’re boyfriends up.”

“Gwendolyn,” Max grunted.  She was standing in a shadow, crying into her sleeve and holding her waist.  She wore his black hooded jacket and baggy carpenter’s jeans beneath a black plastic cloak.  The gardener set the handset firmly on its receiver.  He walked over to the girl, kissed her cheek and lifted a small metal box from her grip.  He then marched across the barn and pulled Max up by his tethered wrists.

“This is how you spend your uncle’s money,” the gardener said flatly.  He cracked the silver case open to reveal ninety-six red tabs.  “You worthless fuckin’ junkie…”  The hunter was behind him, lining his sights with Max’s sullen face.  The gardener inched closer and tapped a dirty forefinger against his captive’s heaving chest.  “You know what?  I’m glad you killed it.  Only thing makes me sicker than looking at your sorry ass still breathing is thinking of that sweet girl having to carry your bad fuckin’ seed.”  He shoved his finger into Max’s sternum.  “She don’t deserve that.”  Max stood straight against the wall behind him and looked at his hands.  Tears were forming in the corners of his swollen red eyes.

“It wasn’t mine,” he sniveled.  “Doc told me I can’t have no kids—on account of my habit.”  The gardener glared at him before careening his neck to see Gwen crying even harder.  He looked back at Max with a reddened grimace.

“Goddamnit!”  He punched Max in the mouth to loosen his jaw.  Then he poured the metal box into his hand and crammed ninety-six hits into Max’s bleeding gape.  Max thrashed his head as hard as he could between the two hands that were squeezing his face and grinding his molars together.  The gardener whispered through clenched teeth.  “Eat up, you twisted son of a bitch.  You’re gonna pay for what you did to us.  Now…”  He inhaled violently.  “Now it’s fuckin’ personal.”  The two fell into a pile on ground as the hunter loomed over them, aiming. 

“Alright, alright—get ‘im in the car,” the hunter ordered.  The gardener dropped the whipping head.  Max coughed and spit.  He was already starting to lose his mind.  He couldn’t stand.  He was dragged out of the barn and through a wet gravel driveway.  Stones were scathing the undersides of his legs like a plague of snapping crawfish.  Raining twilight turned to a black churning cilice that wore furiously at his pupils.  Thunderous percussion formed blasting rhythms against his temples that forced all of his sinuses and facial cavities to drip their contents. He was stuffed into the backseat of a grey Cadillac and made to wrap his lips around a sulfuric black metal tube.  The crash of a closing car door banished all rational thought to beyond the window’s glass and ensconced the drooling hostage in his plastic dementia.