[8] Roach Town

[8]

Time dragged slowly for Zone the next little while. He absently watched the State Police try to figure out how to get the body removed from the crime scene. I became apparent that they were waiting for an ambulance to show up because instead of pacing around and having dumb conversations about how this was the fault of the city slicker and his big German-looking friend, they got into their cruisers. Luckily for Gagger nobody noticed that he and Officer Lindsay were "off for clues." A term that Gagger had made up when pressed about his some malfeasance or other during a court appearance when he was the witness to a certain misfortune that a fellow police officer had committed upon a very unlucky bystander. The prosecutor had said to Gagger:

"So, Detective Gagger, why is it that you were missing from the scene at the very moment that Officer X was behaving in such an unprofessional way?" Gagger had smiled and said:

"Well, it's simple, I was off for clues." Then he winked at Zone, who had come to the trial in solidarity with Gagger. Zone nearly lost his shit. He knew exactly what that meant. The prosecutor did not. He asked:

"Off for clues? Could you explain?" Gagger said in a very matter of fact tone:

"I was, you know, looking for clues." This upset the prosecutor very dearly. He raised his voice:

"Now, sir, what possible clues were you looking for? Keep in mind this was just a basic traffic stop." Gagger shrugged his shoulders and said:

"Sometimes you see something and you have to take a closer look is all. It is part of the job." This exasperated the prosecutor. Had he known what Gagger was "Investigating" he would have been able to make the case right then and there. The defense would have called for a mistrial and that would become it's own thing, but he did not know Gagger was, in fact, in the alley getting a blowjob from a prostitute. From whom he happened to see walking by during the traffic stop. As it turned out though, the prosecutor decided to go down a different line of questioning that allowed the police officer defending himself to walk away from any punishment. Afterwards, while standing in front of the court house, smoking a cigarette, standing next to a hot dog stand. Zone was eating a hot dog. Gagger said:

"Man, I feel bad about that. I should have just told them what happened. There is no way that fucker should have gotten off." Zone ordered a second hot dog. Zone spoke with a mouthful of exactly half of the hot dog with everything. He marbled:

"Yeah, but what can you do? Justice, man. You want me to send an anonymous letter? Tell them the truth?" Gagger thought about this. He handed Zone the half smoked smoke. He ordered a hot dog with mustard. He said:

"Nah, that won't work. But I don't know, that asshole is going to kill someone one of these days. I don't know. I think we would be better off making sure he doesn't do beat work no more, if you can catch my drift." Zone blew out smoke. He looked down and brushed some sauerkraut off the cigarette butt. The two detectives thanked the hot dog vendor and walked down the street. A few weeks later a thing happened that may or may not have been attributed or not attributed to the two detectives, but the you can never tell in this topsy-turvy world we live in, but the officer in question is on permanent desk duty now. Sitting in a chair with two wheels. And the world is a better place because of it.

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So Gagger and Officer Lindsay were "off for clues." The rest of the gang of angry and aggressive State Police were sitting annoyed in their cruisers. The toothpick coward was still very upset about Zone. Zone was leaning on his elbow. Slowly drinking whatever homemade swill it was that had sent the boobs and Constable Bondo into snoozeville. The moon was coming up. The owl continued to hoot. Then there were frogs. A dog barked in the distance. All at once the State Police turned their cruisers off. Then they turned their spotlights off. Then their headlights. The change was startling. Zone had a moment of panic. Like the moonshine just made him blind and deaf. But he recovered. Quickly. Laughing about it. He was a getting drunk again. The Orange Sunshine was still doing it's very best work. He was hyper-aware of everything. Gary Alone farted in his sleep. Zone laughed, but then the smell wafted over and he said:

"C'mon, man!" He scooted away a couple feet. He was annoyed and tried to roll another pinner in the moonlight. It wasn't going very well. He heard a drunken voice say:

"Here, man, you are making me feel bad." The Constable Bondo was offering him a cigarette. Zone took it. He marbled:

"What the hell crawled up that guys ass and died?" Constable Bondo thought this was quite hilarious. He elbowed Gary Alone and said:

"Wake up, Gary! You here this guy? Gary!" Gary farted again. Zone said:

"Dude! Don't encourage him! My god!" Zone stood up and was looking down at the three on the ground. The constable couldn't take it either. He tried to get up. He couldn't. Zone held his nose and walked into the stink and helped him stand up. He grabbed the hand that was holding the cigarettes. Crushing the pack as he got up. Constable Bondo said:

"My smokes!" Zone shook his head. The people around here were weird ducks. Zone understood smokes getting smashed, but he didn't understand using a hand that was filled with smokes as a way to get help standing up and then saying "My smokes!" about it afterward. However, Constable Bondo was drunk, so maybe it wasn't about being a weirdo, maybe it was just about being drunk. Constable Bondo spent a moment trying to get his cigarettes right again. Using the moonlight to figure it out. He took one out of the package and lit it backwards. The filter burned. He said some words about that. Broke the filter off and lit the thing unfiltered. Then he coughed like crazy. Then he said:

"Who are you again?" He may have been a weirdo, but he was mostly just drunk. "How the hell did I, where are we?" He looked around in the moonlight. The greenhouse. The sleeping boobs. The cruisers. The faint noise of bonin' in the woods. "Man, what the..." Zone didn't know how to straighten the guy out. But because he was riding on a higher plain, he used this advantage to gather some information. He tried to speak clearly, but his words came out like a choked river bend. He marbled:

"You Bondo, yeah?" Zone could kind of see Constable Bondo thinking. In Zone's mind his words came out clear as day, but Contsable Bondo heard "Yewer-bondo-yura." For some reason he just said:

"Bondo." Zone took this as a yes. He said:

"Why are you so hard to reach? What's your job anyway? Is that your car over there?" Constable Bondo mumbled "Bondo." Like he was some dimwit discovering a new word. "Bondo." Zone asked again:

"Is that your car?" Over in the distance there was a car. Zone had seen it coming in. It was something that was truly impressive. A thing held together by chewing gum. As much as Zone wanted to get to the bottom of things, the most pressing question to him was thus:

"Is the Constable called Bondo because that is his last name, or is it because he uses a lot of bondo?" He found out. Constable Bondo said:

"That's my car. Yeah, uh-huh. They call me Bondo because of it. Yeah, uh-huh. These jerks. I work so hard and everything, you think, and instead of giving me the money for like something to drive around and keep order around here, they just give me a nickname. I have it in me to quit, I think." Constable Bondo burped. Then did a hiccup. "But I need the money, though, I think." Zone felt better knowing the answer to his question. He still wanted to know why the constable didn't answer his phone, or what his job was exactly, but he would figure that out eventually, or not, Zone moved on, he knew that Constable Bondo had very limited answers to his questions. Zone said:

"Tell me about these two." Constable Bondo understood the "These two" words that came out of Zone's cement mixer of a mouth. Constable Bondo said:

"These two? Well, they are both, uh-huh, um, Gary is sleeping with Dan's ex-wife, he knows it, the whole town knows it, but they refuse to talk about it. They, uh-huh, have a whole thing together, I think, with the greenhouse and all. I don't think that either of them know, uh-huh, how to deal with it. It won't last, Candace and Dan, Dan is an, uh-huh, Dan likes to drink, and Candace is a sweet piece of fruit, uh-huh, you know? Or, I don't know, you know? She is already bored of his nonsense, I heard that from JD, who said he heard it from Gus's wife over in Hancock, so it is probably true, but uh-huh, what the hell do I know? I think I have a chance though went thing go sour, uh-huh, Candace is a real piece of ass around here, you think?" Zone didn't know. He said:

"I don't know Candace, but she seems like a real piece of ass." This animated Constable Bondo, his question being put back to him in the same way he put it. He said:

"Don't you know it, my friend! I sometimes go and get gas when I know she is running the thing, uh-huh, just to get a glimpse, you know? For later, uh-huh. She wears those prairie suits. The long dresses. You know what I mean?" Zone had no idea what he meant. He said:

"A prairie dress that doesn't quit? That sound hot." Constable Bondo said:

"Oh, man! You don't even know! Uh-huh. She graduated in '77, here in town even, I mean, uh-huh, what I would give to go to high school here in those days! Uh-huh! I got stuck over in Granville, man! There wasn't a looker among em'! Uh-huh. Can you imagine those dresses back then? You'd break down the barn with that boner of yours." Constable Bondo seemed to actually consider this. The olden days. How hot Candace must have been in high school. And poor Bondo, stuck over in some other town, whacking off to dogs. Zone didn't know if he was losing the thread, or if this was the way inside. He tried to shift the conversation in order to find out. He said:

"Why would these guys lie to me?" Constable Bondo tried to process the question. He was still thinking about Constance and her early years at Rochester High. But because he was not really thinking he said:

"Oh, uh-huh, that is simple, they have that still up on Townline. They don't think nobody knows about it. Everybody knows about it. Uh-huh." Constable Bondo thought about this. Why was this guy asking these questions. He looked around again. He saw the cruisers in the moonlight. He was sobering up. His butt-less cigarette was burning his fingers. He had forgotten to smoke it. He dropped it on the grass. He asked:

"Who are you again?" The Constable Bondo started to remember why he was there. The murder in the greenhouse. How he had gotten a very frantic call from Gary Alone. How he drove over not knowing what to do. How he and Gary Alone and Union Dan had looked at the body in the greenhouse and had decided to wait for the cops to show up. How he had been told about these assholes from the City had come around and behaved like dicks. How they all decided that they should drink some of the good stuff and make sure that a bear didn't come around and eat the body. About how by the time the cops did show up, they were all two sheets, as it were, and walked over to this exact spot and fell asleep. Constable Bondo said:

"Am I under arrest?" Zone told him he was not under arrest. That nobody was under arrest. That he just wanted to know why anyone would lie to him for no reason. Constable Bondo didn't know what to do. He was too drunk to be in charge of his faculties, but he was sober enough now to keep his mouth shut. He said:

"You sneaky bastard. I can't believe you tricked me, uh-huh. I want a lawyer." Zone didn't know what to do with this switch in personality from Constable Bondo. He tried to calm him down, but it just made things worse. Zone said:

"No, man! I don't fucking know. I was just asking questions about shit and everything, man. There is nothing tricky about what I was saying." Constable Bondo said:

"Trick me once, shame on you, uh-huh, I know how you city slickers work. I don't even..." Constable Bondo stormed off to his bubble-gum car. He got inside. Started it. He didn't turn the lights on. He drove immediately into a ditch. Zone ran over to the episode. Constable Bondo was gunning the car in reverse. The car was going nowhere. Zone went to the driver's side window and did the universal sign for "Roll it down." The constable rolled the window down, still trying to get the car out of the ditch. Zone said:

"Man! Give it up! You're going nowhere. Just relax." The Constable Bondo did some steering wheel turning. Left and right, left and right. There was nothing doing. He said:

"You can't arrest me! I am the constable!" Zone yelled back:

"Let it go, man! You are stuck. You're gonna fuck your shit up!" The Constable Bondo gave up. He sat there with his hands on the steering wheel. Looking straight ahead. Like something defeated. He patted his dash board and said:

"Okay, uh-huh, you got me." Then he turned the car off. Tried to put it into park. But because he had turned the car off, it wouldn't go into park. He said:

"Why can't I do anything right? I am such a loser!" He started to bawl. Zone didn't know how to take this. He stood there looking. He wanted to help, but there was no helping this broken child. He was too drunk for words. He would sleep it off in the car. In the morning he would wake up with an even more vague understanding than the one he already was having. Zone knew this because he had been there before. Getting black-out drunk, followed by a moment of clarity, followed by an even more severe black-out. He felt bad for the Constable. He stood there watching him cry, his crying slowly turning into swaying. Then, like all good drunks, the Constable Bondo passed out. Zone reached into his car and took the keys out of the ignition. He threw them on top of the junk that the Constable Bondo had on his passenger seat. Mostly empty boxes of take-out food and empty bottles of soda-pop. He could get up and want to drive home, Zone decided, but it would take a while before he found the keys. And basically, he would have to be sober enough to drive before he could drive. As Zone pulled himself out of the Constable Bondo's driver's side window he was met with a very exhausted and smelly Gagger. His eyes looked half-closed in the moonlight. Zone sighed. Gagger said:

"Can we go now?" Zone took pity on Gagger. He smelled like a trash can. A trash can that had been rolled down a sex mountain, stopping often to have anal sex and multiple explosive orgasms. Zone's nose kind of recoiled. Like he had been hit with a wet sock filled with gallon of semen. It was too much. Even for Gagger. Zone looked over Gagger's shoulder. The Officer Lindsay was standing there. Her stupid cowboy hat, the one with the dimples, cocked to the side. She looked like she might throw up. She had a branch stuck in her hair. Zone snuck around the side of Gagger. To get away from the smell. The Officer Lindsay came over to Zone and said:

"What's the ten-four?" Zone felt like he just sucked Gagger's dick. Her breath was so strong. He thought:

"What the hell?" Between Gary Alone's farts, and now Gagger and the Officer Lindsay's dick breath, he couldn't catch a break. There was nothing to do about it though. Zone reached over and took the branch out of Officer Lindsay's hair. He said:

"You guys stink. Go roll around in the manure over there, because this is not good. We can pretend that you fell into it on accident." The two lovers laughed about this. Zone said:

"I am serious. Do it." Gagger and the Officer Lindsay understood that Zone wasn't joking. They walked over to a patch of manure and rolled around in the moonlight. Constable Bondo snored behind the steering wheel of his car. Held together with chewing gum. Stuck in the ditch. Zone saw a flash of light. A vehicle was making it's way up the road. Zone watched as it got closer. He knew what it was. The ambulance, for sure. When the thing got to where Zone was he waved it on. The thing stopped, the windows already rolled down. It was not an ambulance. It was a hearse. The driver yelled over the front seat to Zone:

"Chickadee? Right?" Zone pointed to the greenhouse. He said:

"The corpse is there." The driver, wearing a ponytail, listening to music said:

"Right on, man. Is everything okay?" Zone didn't say anything. The driver said:

"Yeah, okay then." He started to drive past the car in the ditch, Gagger and the Officer Lindsay rolling around in the manure. Suddenly the cruisers turned on again. Shooting beams of light at the greenhouse. The toothpick coward got out of his cruiser and started directing the hearse. Zone watched the hearse maneuver the scene. Doing a twenty point turn to get situated. The toothpick coward making sure that everyone knew he was in charge. Zone walked over to watch as they put the bloated body on a thing and slid it into the back of the hearse. He smelled Gagger and the Officer Lindsay as they approached from behind. Zone frowned. The toothpick coward said to Zone:

"I guess that is that. Thank you for your help. We will get you back to the old folk's home, but your services are no longer needed." Zone could feel the tension. The Captain wanted to strangle him. And the fact that he had taken a punch at Zone was still dangling in the breeze. Zone said:

"Yeah, no. I think we can't catch a ride with this guy, thanks." This pissed the toothpick coward off. He yelled:

"You know what I think of that?" Zone said:

"I don't know? It stinks?" The Captain said:

"No! You better fucking watch your back, you liberal dipshit!" Zone made a face that the toothpick coward didn't like. He had to be restrained. Zone really didn't understand what the guys problem was, but it didn't matter. He was done with the the scene. Gagger was pie-eyed, and the Constable Bondo was stuck in a ditch. Zone was starting to come down from the Orange Sunshine. He was thinking about going to bed now. There was nothing else to do about anything. The Officer Lindsay snuck around the front of the hearse. One of the other cops said:

"What is that smell?" Nobody asked the hearse driver if it was okay for the two detectives to get a ride. But they got into the front of the hearse anyway. After a moment, Zone in the middle, Gagger at the window, the hearse driver got in himself. He shut the door. He said:

"Whoa! Whose been rolling around in shit?" Gagger said:

"Mind if I smoke?" The hearse driver said:

"Please do!" Zone laughed. Gagger handed everyone smokes. Then lit them. The hearse driver turned on his lights and made his way back towards town. As they passed the Constable Bondo, the hearse driver said:

"That fucker. How the hell he gets paid to do his job is beyond me. Where we headin', boys?"