Forget about what the poets tell you. The ocean stinks. This one was no different. Calling it a beach would only be putting on airs and the air around here stinks. Am I repeating myself? So are the waves. The waves crawl in and the waves crawl out, pawing and rooting at the shore like they’ve been practicing this fruitless infiltration of theirs for an awfully long time.
The place is alive and crawling. Sand fleas hop and pop from out of the dead seaweed that draggles across the bare bone rocks like the tangled-up neon-stained and bobby-pinned death-wig of a three hundred seventy-eight pound cancered-out conga dancer. A fiddler crab is conducting a one-claw rendition of a Gypsy G Major Hora blindfolded while a seagull plunks a harp solo on the bones of the last catch of an old man who had fished alone in a Gulf Stream skiff, going eighty four days without catching so much as a cold before blowing his brains out with a double-bore-metaphor-stuffed shotgun. The shrimp are calling out “Tekelili, tequila,” in an eldritch mocking key that hits all of the resonant frequencies of the all-is-definitely-not-right-with-this-world call center of my instinct.
And here I am sitting in the cold and dark freezing my caped ass off. I should have stayed in the cab where it was warm and stank of cumin stained armpits. The cab driver who drove me here had watched me warily in his rear view mirror. Warily, because he didn’t get all that many customers wearing masks.
I didn’t care.
I was used to this sort of treatment.
At least he drove a pretty good car. It looked like a sixth generation Buick LeSabre, a big comfortable blood red ride. I’m saving up for a brand spanking new Captain Nothing Mobile with four on the floor and eight out of twelve cylinders pumping in internal combustive unison but until then I’ll settle for taking cabs. So far I’ve saved up the deposit refund on three empty beer bottles, a fistful of change in the bottom of a rusted-out coffee tin, and a counterfeit IOU that I wrote to myself in a reasonable facsimile of Marilyn Monroe’s handwriting.
Goodbye Norma Jean.
“Are you a bandit?” the cab driver had asked me. “Why are you wearing a mask?”
That was a pretty good question and I wasn’t sure I knew the answer. I had decided sometime ago that my calling in life was to be a super hero and so far this was as far as I could get. Driving around in the back of gypsy cabs, staring out at life through the double bore of a hand stitched Lone Ranger mask.
“I’m in disguise,” I said.
“My grandfather was a bandit,” my cab driver went on, not really wanting to listen to my answer. “He carried a tulwar and would ride down on travelers and take what they had. He never used the tulwar on anyone, you understand. He was a good man who supported his family. The tulwar was nothing more than advertising.”
I thought about that. I looked at his taxi permit. It said his name was Something Unpronounceable S’dhintzski.
I told myself that it might have been an alias.
“False advertising,” I said. “If he wasn’t going to use the tulwar.”
S’dhintzksi smiled at that.
“No sir. My grandfather always told the truth. He could have killed if he had to but for most people the threat of death is enough to make them listen.”
He had a point.
“Threats sometimes have to have a proper snarl of teeth behind them to back them up,” I said.
S’dhintzksi shrugged. “Sometimes the only thing that is needed to back a threat up is the belief that it is real.”
He was still making sense, so I gave it to him.
“So are you a spy?” S’dhintzski asked.
“Not a spy,” I said.
“Then what?” he asked.
I looked around the cab for some sort of inspiration. There was a plastic hula dancer on the cab driver’s dash board. It bobbed and shimmied as the car moved down the road. I couldn’t take my eyes from off of the little Hawaiian hootchy-kootch mama. Man, she sure had rhythm.
“I’m a hero,” I said. “A super hero. Do you believe that?”
He laughed gently.
I let him laugh.
“So tell me the truth,” he said. “Who are you?”
I shrugged.
“I have heard of heroes,” he said. “The Lone Ranger, the Batman, the Green Hornet and Roy Rogers. Men who stood up for what they believed were right and bared their teeth in the face of bad danger.”
He smiled at me in the rear view mirror.
“So what is the truth? Who are you?”
“Sea patrol,” I said. “I’m going down to see the sea to see if it’s still sitting there where I left it.”
“I believe you,” he said. “But I also believe in this.”
He patted the side of the cab meter.
“And this,” S’dhintzksi said, holding up a battered Louisville Slugger – as real a credential as any naked tulwar I had ever seen.
So it was my turn to laugh.
We kept on driving.
I noticed that he drove with one hand on the wheel while he fiddled nervously with a string of navy blue Muslim prayer beads with his other hand. There were worse things to fiddle with, I supposed. Normally such careless driving habits would have bothered me but given the mess I was getting myself into I figured a prayer or two, even by proxy or possible osmosis, couldn’t hurt.
“This is a bad place,” S’dhintzksi said. “Are you sure you want to get out here onto this beach?”
I wasn’t sure but I told him I was.
“Maybe I should stay,” S’dhintzksi said. “Or I could circle back to see if you need any help.”
I nodded, figuring I’d never see S’dhintzksi again.
I didn’t really want to get out here.
I needed to.
Which brought me to where I was, right here sitting on a tombstone-sized slab of oil stained beach granite staring out into the world’s dirtiest body of water.
And it was dirty. Eight years ago an oil spill had erupted from the belly of a tanker that ran aground while the ship’s skipper was studying his charts through a blurry eyed blend of root beer schnapps and Dr. Pepper. The oil had clotted across the coastline, mixing and mingling with the unholy combination of the root beer schnapps and the Dr. Pepper, killing off flocks of seagulls and a few wandering sea lions.
Some folks will tell you that there’s been a series of underground nuclear testing down here, back in the late forties. I know for a fact there has been toxic waste dumping going on for the last decade.
That’s what the ocean is for, isn’t it? We dump ourselves into it, one molecule at a time. Stand in a rain storm or your morning shower and you’ll feel the bits and pieces of yourself slicking away down the drain to where all roads lead to the sea.
In the lexicon of the realist, the word “ocean” is a synonym for need. Take a look around you the next time you find yourself next to one. The ocean is deep and restless and damn near bottomless. It is need and greed and feed all wrapped up into a single stinking sudsy wet bundle. Fish eating fish. The drowner’s forever swallow. The waves always reaching for the shoreline and never quite touching – it’s a moving performance art wet dream demonstration of raw unrequited hunger.
My name is Nothing.
Captain Nothing.
The Captain part of it stood for nothing. I’ve never served in the military. I don’t think I could really take it. All of that brass polishing brown nosing knee jerk aggression, it wouldn’t suit me. I’m far too sensitive a soul for such militant crassness.
What shit. If I had to be honest with you I just liked the way the word Captain sounded echoed against Nothing. Everybody needs some kind of rank and I’m as rank as they come.
I was down here to investigate the disappearance of someone who had been close enough to me to pass for a friend. He’d been camping out down here in an old fish shed because he’d lacked the funds sufficient enough to qualify for the cheapest of flop houses.
His name was Jerrod and he’d been hooked on horses and whores. First he started with the betting and then later one of the whores told him that he’d stay sharper if he laid a little smack down before he laid his money down. Too bad no one ever told him his addiction was fashionably out of style.
He burned his life down. This spontaneous act of self inflicted soul-arson left him parked down here with no fixed address.
“Hey!”
Somebody was calling from behind me, trying their best to get my attention. I let them get a little closer, staring out to sea like I hadn’t heard. I may be just some guy in a sewn-on leather mask, but I sure as hell wasn’t a cab to be hailed.
“Hey!” the voice was getting closer.
I kept staring at the sea. There was something compelling about the way the water moved, like the shimmy of a painted plastic bob-along hula dancer’s skirt. I just couldn’t take my eyes from off of the motion.
“Hey,” the voice barked, just behind my ear. I felt a hand clamp down onto my shoulder blade, squeezing like a starfish muckling onto a likely-looking mollusc. “Didn’t you hear me?”
I turned to look as if I hadn’t. It was a policeman or at least he was dressed as one. He wore a name tag that said C. Garry but there wasn’t that much there to see.
I studied his tag closely. There was no rank, just C. Garry. That seemed strange to me. Did policeman even wear name tags? I couldn’t remember. I reminded myself to take nothing at surface level.
“Beach police,” I said, thinking warm Jedi thoughts. These are not the droids you are looking for. “I’m supposed to be down here.”
“So why didn’t you answer me?” C. Garry asked.
“Hay is for horses,” I said.
C. Garry looked at me strangely as if I’d said something I shouldn’t have.
“This is a crime scene,” he said. “You shouldn’t be out here.”
Oh shit.
Where was Gil Grissom when you really needed him?
“It just looked like a beach to me,” I said. “Why make a scene out of things?”
I wanted to flash my fake badge and identification card but if C. Garry really was a cop than his trained deductive skills might pick up on the flattened aluminum foil badge and the photocopied identification, which was all of the forgery I could afford.
“The beach is my beat,” I said, trying to sound worldly. “There is a story for every grain of dirt washed up upon it and I’m the hourglass it sifts through.”
Joe Friday, eat your heart out.
“It’s a crime scene,” C. Garry doggedly repeated. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“So where’s the yellow tape?” I asked, trying to appear both reasonable and semi-professional.
“The high tide took it,” C. Garry admitted. “Have you ever tried to cordon off a beach?”
Something was not right here but I couldn’t figure out what.
“Life’s a beach,” I said philosophically, giving C. Garry my best Buddha smile. “We all get to surf it up until the tide runs out.”
“You’re damned straight,” C. Garry said.
“You never know,” I said. “People who wear masks can be pretty kinky.”
That was it. That’s what was bothering me about the whole situation. Here we were standing face to face, a police man and a full-time superhero and part time lunatic and he hadn’t mentioned the cape or the mask yet. I took a deep breath in, smelling seaweed and dead fish with a strange unmistakable undercurrent of manure.
“Ah,” I said. “Smell that good sea air.”
“Dead cunts,” C. Garry said.
I gave him a look. As ice breakers went this one could have served in the Coast Guard.
“You want to run that by me again?” I asked.
“You ever smell a dead cunt?”
I allowed that I hadn’t had much of an opportunity.
“I like to do it when they’re slabbed out in the meat house drawer. I just stick my snoot down into that old bacon hole and sniff it up.”
I couldn’t help but ask him why.
“Pheromones,” he explained. “The stink gets into your nostrils and whips up a little instant hornification into the old purple headed avenger.”
He grabbed onto his crotch to demonstrate. I considered that a pretty tacky breach in scrotocol.
“I’ll take your word for it,” I assured him.
Still clinging to his crotch he performed a magnificent pelvic thrust. Laka Tahini Wombat Pahu-uli-uli-quim-banger – the goddess of Hula dashboard ornaments would have been pleased and proud as a pitcher of pineapple punch.
“It’s what’s good for you,” he said. “It can make a Moby Dick out of your Gilligan in jinky-jig time, you bet.”
“You really need to lay off the red meat,” I said. “All of that artificial coloring is getting to your brain.”
“Wuss,” he said.
At least I think that’s what he said. It sounded a little like “wuss” and a little like “woof.”
I didn’t bother contradicting him.
“So what went on down here?” I asked.
“You’re the Beach Police,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to know?”
“Let’s dialogue this out,” I said, stepping in close to give him a big toothy you-got-me kind of grin, letting him know that I knew he had my number. Then I shot one hand out, aimed straight at his crotch where I caught him by his woolly Christ apples.
“Now are you going to tell me what I want to hear,” I asked him, squeezing his testicles just a little to keep his attention firmly in hand. “Or am I going to have to reap this here pair of peaches?”
Actually, from the heft of them they were more aptly apricots, but I got his attention all the same. It’s a funny thing about a man and his eggs. Nobody likes to see them scrambled.
“They found some bum on this beach,” the cop said, forming his words carefully as if he were afraid that his throat might crack in the process.
His throat or something else.
“The bum’s name was Jerrod,” I said, squeezing just hard enough to mash his spuds and cream them.
Jerrod wasn’t a friend of mine but he was the closest I had to it. He had disappeared and I’d come down here to make things right. Either that or it was a slow night on television.
You pick.
I’m going to stand on my Miranda and remain completely ambiguous.
“That’s right. Jerrod,” the cop sputtered, correcting himself. “We found him over there,”
He pointed down to the beach.
“And there and there...”
He kept pointing madly in all directions like a twelve legged shorthaired pointer, cannonballed collarless into a universe of unlimited duck preserves.
“I get the picture,” I said. “Is that all you found? What about clues? Shit, you’re a cop aren’t you? Didn’t you find a matchbook or a business card or a hand written confession signed by Professor Plum?”
I squeezed a little tighter, hoping to wring out a bit of spontaneous inspiration. C. Garry mumbled something that might have been the sound of him clearing his throat or perhaps he was muttering his last dying confession in ancient bastardized Sumerian.
“Say that again,” I urged him.
“Hoof prints,” he coughed out. “The beach was covered with hoof prints.”
“Holy shit,” I said, inadvertently squeezing my fist shut.
C. Garry did just that. He shat himself in spontaneous agony, unloading a great reeking bale of fecal fall-out. I looked down. He’d hit the bull’s-eye, two boots full. Too bad they were my boots. Call them collateral damage. I was standing in a pile of something shot through with deep water kelp and lavender sea slugs. It looked a little like a pre-chewed human liver.
Don’t ask me how I would know.
I squeezed harder, ignoring the shitfall.
“Now cough and say ah,” I ordered.
He coughed like he had something caught in his throat.
“I wasn’t being literal when I said cough,” I told him, trying hard not to laugh at his panicked stupidity. I had been worried that I was into something way over my head but this poor asshole was nothing more than a cop, scared stupid and shitting his pants.
How wrong I could be.
C. Garry coughed again, a wet kind of cough that sounded a little like eel-clotted waves crawling across slabs of beach granite. There was something in his mouth, hiding behind the cough. Something long and hard and tubular.
He coughed again and his face seemed to elongate, his lips stretching out like the pale withered fish lips of a ninety eight year old hooker’s sushi taco. The tip of something long and hard and vaguely oaken spit out between the policeman’s rubbery teeth.
Holy Christ.
Was he regurgitating a back-swallowed dildo?
“Stop that,” I said.
He coughed again. The dildo, if that’s what it was, pushed out a little further from his mouth. While that was happening above, a similar lengthening was going on below. The apricots were mutating.
Damn.
It turns out the bastard was hung like Secretariat.
I was disgusted, standing there hanging onto to some guy’s bone-hard mud snake, but I wasn’t about to let go. If I let him go now there was no telling what the bastard might do.
I hung on to the Moby of dicks like I was Captain Ahab in a leather Lone Ranger mask.
This guy’s meat harpoon kept extending, stretching my hand out until it felt as if my tendons might crack. My hand was way beyond cramped. This iron bone would have given Stretch Armstrong a run for his money.
Forget about hung like a horse, this bastard’s giggle-stick felt more like something along the lines of a SWAT team’s battering ram.
Up top it was way worse. His lips were pushed forward about a hand span and the hollows in his cheeks were stretching out like he had bungee cords for facial structure. He kept coughing that dogwood dildo up out of his mouth and now I could see what it really was. It was a policeman’s night stick.
The bastard was bringing up a billy club.
I let go of his rapidly expanding pecker. It was either that or run the risk of having my hand broken from the strain.
He reached out and caught hold of my throat.
His hand felt hard and rounded, like a horseshoe.
I looked down and I saw a hoof, instead of a hand.
I looked up just in time to see that spit-stained nightstick swinging down and then everything went black.
* 2 *
I love building sand castles.
“Just hold still,” C. Garry said to me. “If you wiggle too much you’re going to get sand jammed up your trouser trout.”
Only it wasn’t a police officer any more. Not even close. All that was left of C. Garry was a heap of abandoned skin that lay upon the dirt beside me like a pair of flaccid pink overalls and a smear of something that looked as if it had been defecated by a herd of incontinent South English pygmy cannibals.
Oh, excuse me. Did I say the dirt beside me? I should say the dirt upon me. The horse-dicked bastard asshole had heaped beach sand and rocks and debris upon me. As far as I could tell from the feel of the damp ocean breeze, there was nothing poking through but my face up top and my one eyed zipper fish down below.
Oddly enough, my full blown Stallone bone was standing ten-hut erect, as if I were staring at a sky-wide three dimensional pin-up of Esther Williams. I’m not sure why that was happening. Being buried prematurely beneath a heap of oil-slicked beach jetsam was definitely not my idea of a steamy wet dream.
“Once I get up out of here,” I promised. “I’m going to pull you apart limb from limb.”
“I’ll beat you to it,” C. Garry said.
Only it wasn’t C. Garry anymore, like I said. It looked more like Mr. Ed the talking horse. Or maybe Frances, the talking mule on really bad loco weed. The self-centaured bastard was a definite example of Equus caballus or your everyday wild horse only this definitely was a horse of a different color. He looked a weird kind of blue/gray/green color, like nothing I’d ever seen before.
And that was just for starters.
“Ha,” he gave me a horse laugh. “You ought to see how funny you look with your pump-handle periscoped up out of the dirt like that.”
I didn’t find it funny at all.
“You remind me of a joke about this fellow who shits in his bathing suit and buries himself in the sand and then while he’s lying there looking up the skirt at the collective land clam of some wandering tribe of beachside nymphomaniacs, old Mr. Happy Helmet pokes up out of the dirt. Only while he’s busy raising his love flag the tribe of nymphomaniacs wanders off with a dude who looks suspiciously like Charles Atlas. And then while he’s laying there in the dirt bemoaning his beach-buried blue-balled fate this old petrified blue-haired octogenarian notices him lying there. Oh my, she says, all those years I spent looking for something like this and here it was growing wild on the beach. Then she popped out her false teeth and knelt down and gave him a big sloppy wet…”
“Stop,” I said.
He gave me another horse laugh. His teeth were large and irregular and stained a marvelous shade of verdigris. His breath stank of dead fish and worse things.
“So what the hell are you?” I asked.
“Kelpie,” he said, barking out the word so it sounded a little like a gulp and a choke squeezed and drowned together into one guttural noise.
“Do you want to grind that out a little finer for me?” I asked. “I seem to have some beach mud stuck in my ears.”
“Kelpie,” the horse-thing repeated. “Don’t they teach you modern people anything in school?”
Actually most of what learned in school amounted to a twelve year long over-glorified Pavlovian brain-washed obedience session.
Too bad I mostly flunked.
Only I didn’t want to bother saying all that to him so I settled for “Fuck off, Trigger.”
I kept trying to push free.
“Don’t bother,” the Kelpie said. “I’ve packed the dirt in extra tight.”
He wasn’t kidding. I could barely breathe. In fact I thought I could see the ghost of a few oil-tainted sea gulls drifting overhead of me. I blamed it on oxygen deprivation. I had read Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and new dead seagulls didn’t usually stick around.
“A kelpie is a sea horse who haunts the coastline for anyone dumb enough to climb on top and try to ride him,” the Kelpie said. “That’s what Constable Garry did. He was down here investigating your friend’s death. He saw me and he thought he’d take a ride. You wouldn’t know it to look at him but he used to be a hell of a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman.”
“So what about Jerrod?” I asked.
“Him?” the Kelpie sneered. It was an interesting experience watching a demon horse sneer. “He was nothing but fun.”
I wondered how much fun it had been for Jerrod. While I was wondering the Kelpie squatted over my face.
“He had a ball,” the Kelpie said. “You will too.”
I looked up and began to panic.
The Kelpie had a mammoth nut-sack, all blue and dangly, hanging down above my nose like a pregnant suffocated coconut. I could see Jerrod’s face squirming beneath the Kelpie’s ballocks, pushing out from the azure-veined befurred lovesack like a man drowning beneath a life-sucking mask of blueberry Jell-O.
And then the bastard pissed on me. A great sizzling splash of ammonia and spoiled aftershave that damn near drowned me on dry land which might have been the point.
I’ve never had a horse piss on me before and certainly never a demon horse but let me tell you it was anything but fun. The Kelpie bastard drained his big swinging poke-liver down on me like I had the mother-goddess of all urinals sitting upon my face. I could hear the piss hissing about my ears like a bucket full of whispering rattlesnakes. There was seaweed and semen and tiny blue sea serpents wriggling through the whole entire deluge, swimming into my nostrils and ear holes and around the cracks of my tightly sealed lips.
Like I said, it wasn’t fun.
“I’m going to leave you here for the high tide to drown you under,” the Kelpie said. “And later tonight I’ll graze on what’s left of your bones.”
I felt myself being possessed by the spirit of an oil poisoned sea lion. I smelled the tattletale odor of root beer schnapps and Dr. Pepper.
I pushed upwards. The gushing fire hose of horse urine had washed some of the dirt away from my head and throat and shoulders and I nearly pulled free when all at once I heard the blast of a blaring car horn and the squeal of tires screeching over dirt.
The Kelpie looked startled.
I twisted my neck and grinned as a blood red Buick LeSabre came charging across the dirt. S’dhintzski was riding to the rescue, steering one handed with the prayer beads clenched in his gritted teeth and his All American Louisville slugger brandished out of the driver’s window like a timber-whacking tulwar.
I took advantage of the distraction and sat up suddenly, raising my head up as if I were trying to go for the one thousandth sit-up of a feel-the-burn work out. I couldn’t pull myself free of the dirt but I raised up just high enough to catch hold of Jerrod’s face, buried beneath the Kelpie’s balls.
I bit down hard like a war horse fighting a rusted bit.
It was a little like chewing on an Indian Rubber Tree hackey sack but I hung on just as hard as I could. The Kelpie reared up and I felt my left lower molar threatening to abandon ship and then all at once I felt myself pull free from the dirt like a jet-propelled zombie rising up from the grave.
The Kelpie’s momentum tore me loose from the beach dirt. A yard and a half of road rash graveled out across my six inches of skin flute and I think I successfully depilatated my dangling baggage, quicker than a sudden rip of duct tape, hot wax and nuclear powered Krazy Glue.
I got my hands up and free and reached around the Kelpie’s gut, linking my legs high. The bastard’s hooves were coming down like cracks of lightning. I locked my legs and took as many shots as I could, working right and left hooks up into the Kelpie’s gut like the beast’s belly had mutated into some kind of a horizontal heavy bag.
Meanwhile I kept gnawing down as hard as I could on the big bastard’s bannocks. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded. They tasted like something that had been scraped from off a slug’s belly and smelled even worse. They had a rubbery texture that defied all descriptive similes.
I felt degraded. I felt despair. I felt like I was doomed to give Pokey a blowjob forever.
Meanwhile, S’dhintzski was out of his LeSabre and swinging that Louisville Slugger for all he was worth. He had the prayer beads wrapped around the handle of the bat and was giving it his all like a roid-raging Barry Bonds.
Meanwhile the Kelpie was screaming like God was dragging the world’s largest set of fingernails across a shrieking blackboard in the center of the Kelpie’s soul.
I’d like to say we beat the bastard but life doesn’t always have those neat kind of happy endings. Things on the beach have a way of coming back, like last night’s burritos.
The Kelpie tore himself free and galloped into the surf and was gone before I could do anything.
“Did we kill it?” S’dhintzki asked.
“I don’t know if we could,” I said.
“Will it be back?”
If he did come back, I thought, he’d be whinnying soprano.
I spat out what was in my mouth and formed a grin around the bad taste that was left behind.
“Would you come back after what we dished out?” I asked.
“You might be right,” S’dhintzski said.
“You mean you believe me?” I asked.
“I believe in Nothing,” S’dhintzski said.
“Me too,” I agreed.
The waves rolled in and rolled on out and didn’t say a goddamn thing.