Rest for the Wicked

“Ain’t no rest for the wicked,
Money don’t grow on trees,
I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed,
There ain’t nothin’ in this world for free.”

His heart was beating exactly double the speed of the song’s tempo as he pressed the entirety of his weight on the gas pedal. Tightening his grip on the leather of the wheel, the man felt all of his fear, exhilaration, and unfiltered rage pool on the floor of his diaphragm, until the tsunami of raw emotion began to rise steadily upwards; burning his sternum, swelling the back of his throat, reddening his face. The higher it got, the louder he screamed, until the sound no longer resembled anything human; more like a fire alarm, as if the man’s body was making one last desperate plea for reason. There would be no reason today.

The air shook violently around him. The man wasn’t sure if this was due the sheer volume of his voice, or to the fact that his 1966 maroon Mustang convertible had just reached 90 miles an hour. He watched the speedometer click upwards; past 100, then 110, then 120, 130. The desert around him melded into the color of old butter, and the sky was far too blue.

An 18-wheeler materialized on the horizon and grew in size at an astonishing rate. The man stopped screaming in order to grin widely, pushing the curtain of his lip back all the way, revealing even his molars. A thought in the form of a middle-school math question popped into the man’s mind.

If John the psycho-ass mothafukin Doe is going 150 miles an hour, and Mary the redneck tubby-ass tranny trucker Jane is going 65 miles an hour, and the distance between them is approximately not-so-fuckin-much, who’s gonna turn into a fuckin mush of blood pudding first? He hated blood pudding and often wondered about what kind of smart-ass invented the shit. Why can’t there just be chocolate pudding? For that matter, why the fuck don’t people have chocolate going through their veins instead of blood to begin with? He added righteous indignation to the list of the emotions flooding his brain as he maneuvered the car to the center of the road.

The truck honked wildly when he got close. At the last moment, it swerved and locked its breaks. The truck’s body skidded one way, its cargo, another. The axle couldn’t take the strain and snapped like a dry twig. With the sudden release in pressure, the truck flipped, bouncing through the air as it rolled towards the man. The twisted heap of metal missed the shiny chrome bumper of the ‘66 Mustang by a quarter of an inch.

With a whoop, the man leapt up onto his seat, unzipped his jeans, bent over and presented his bare white ass to the quickly disappearing wreckage behind him; wrenching his head backwards over one shoulder and screaming, “THAT’S RIGHT YOU CHICKEN-ASS MOTHAFUKA!”  He laughed and swayed his rear end back and forth in a taunting manner, all the while hoping to see the explosion he’d come to expect from action movies.

Meanwhile, the Mustang drifted off the asphalt of the road, and the shiny chrome of its bumper plugged into an unyielding mound of sand. The man was jettisoned from the white leather seat at almost exactly 100 miles an hour and clipped his foot on the windshield; sending him into a series of implausibly cartoonish arial cartwheels. He flew for about 30 feet, his jeans still around his ankles, his frame still heaving with laughter, and his bowels loosening in every which direction, until his flight was abruptly stopped by a twelve foot cactus.

In the sudden silence that ensued, the Mustang’s radio echoed out into the desert.

“No there ain’t no rest for the wicked,
Until we close our eyes for good.”