Just as Ugly as Before

There lived in a small house on the edge of a small town on a dead end road to a smaller town a middle-aged man with wicked body odor and a putrid character. Next to his house was a red rusted car with a tree growing through the engine block. Rotting leaves had buried the machine to the fenders in spongy dirt, and any number of creatures made their nests in its cracks and compartments. The house itself was far less habitable.

Henry, as the fellow was called, got around on foot. Considering the liquor store was four and a half miles from his house, this was an impressive feat, and one which was often surmised to be responsible for his continued good health despite an inexplicably consistent and consistently inexplicable eight-hundred-dollar-a-week cigar and whisky habit. Cigars and whisky, incidentally, were all he ever purchased, and it was surmised that his other nutritional needs were met by squirrel meat, which he acquired, it was said, by standing under a tree and wafting his odors skyward.

Considering the small size of the town, Henry's weekly economic contribution was enough to secure a small but influential base of political support. Such support is absolutely necessary for a man of his repugnance and wealth. Morality, you see, is at best a subjective matter, and when one of the subjects has crippling halitosis and is rumored to have sex with grizzly bears, justice is often in need of earthly quarter, which, in this case, manifested itself in the form of the liquor store owner's ratty-mustachioed uncle, who wore a shiny sheriff's badge pinned to his shirt and a six-shooter on his hip. This second-hand nepotism served to stanch the natural flow of wealth from those who nobody would miss, to those who keep grandfather's rifle on the mantle and have a fair chance of missing, but are willing to try just the same.

This political favor, though, did not preclude the great deal of conspiratorial talk inevitable in such cases, and, for a time, much talk was made, albeit mostly in whispers or slurs. Many were curious about the actual source of that four million dollars, invested over fourteen years in Henry's liver and lungs, and men had twice made investigations and come back with nothing but tetanus in one case, rabies in another, and some unidentifiable and lingering odor in both. One of the men died, the other was charged with trespassing, and lust after Henry's money was relegated to the patrie of drunken conjecture.

The legends, however, grew. A man called Brit (short for Britches), one of the regulars at Pfannenschmidt's Pub, had colorful story about Henry's fishing technique. The fickle river that passed Henry's shack upstream had a fair trout population, and when the season was right, Brit said, he'd catch twelve in an hour. "So I was out there in my waders, the little bastards fighting for a bite of my hook," he'd say, and he'd take a swig of beer, "and I hears this splashing around on up the river, scaring all the fish real good, then I look down at the water, and it's red like there's a fucking elephant with its gut cut open just bleeding up the whole damn river. Shot one of those once. Thing bled like a goddamn garden hose. Then these busted up trout come floating down the river, belly up and eyes popping out of the skulls, looking like somebody took a mallet to 'em. So I walk around the corner, and see there, buck naked, bent over in the river, Henry, punching the shit out of these fish and chucking them into a pile on the bank." Then he'd get quiet and go back to his beer.

"So what did you do then?" somebody would ask.

"I went fucking home is what."

Chronicle and conjecture here met, copulated, and discharged their indeterminate brood into an ever swelling mythos, which had long since bilged out of the barroom and lodged itself somewhere in the very being of the town.

There were a few facts about how Henry arrived, fewer about where he came from, and jack shit on where he was headed. Jackie Thomas, the richest liquor store owner this side of the Mississippi, was an asshole, but his proximity to the object of discussion allowed him some small and begrudgingly granted authority.

The Facts, as Jackie Thomas put them, were these:

Henry had arrived fourteen years ago. He was an employee of the National Park Service sent by the government to make sure the forests were growing properly. Because he was the only Park Service employee stationed in that region, he was payed a regular and exorbitant salary. That salary was well spent on fine cigars and whisky, the provision of which, to this important civil servant, was crucial to the well-being of the nation. To support his claims, Jackie cited a marking on a map that closer resembled a dead fly than a ranger station. Despite the fact that there was no national park land for 167 miles in any direction, the Sheriff fully endorsed this version of events, and went as far as threatening with slander charges anybody who denied them.

The opposition's story, of course, was rather more exciting, though no more verifiable. This was an amalgam of the most popular conjecture, which, without regard for internal consistency, had coalesced into a single narrative.

Henry had been part of a notorious gang of bank robbers. They went from town to town, always two steps ahead of the law, cleaning out vaults and brutalizing the citizenry. Henry was the mean one who held a sawed off shotgun and shouted at people to get on the floor or he'd blow their fucking faces out the backs of their fucking heads. As much as he enjoyed this, the grace required to be a member of an organized gang of robbers was rather beyond him, and after a string of successes, he decided to blow some faces through the backs of some skulls and make his own fortune. Precisely at this point, his shotgun ceased to function, and he was forced to chew the heads off his compatriots. Because his father was a wealthy Massachusetts senator, the law was discouraged from chasing him on the condition that he stay in a small shack on the outskirts of our fair city and only sate his acquired taste for human blood on full moon nights. He arrived, therefore, on a dark and stormy night fourteen years ago, and when his car broke down in the middle of town, he either pulled it by the bumper to where it now rests or drafted a team of rabid wolves to give him a lift while he leaned his head out the window and snarled.

Those who were present on the sunny day fourteen years ago to witness Henry peering quizzically under the hood of his car and swearing horribly wouldn't think of questioning this unofficial dogma.

Few strangers passed through the town, fewer stopped, and none had stayed for a good long time. When a couple of young folks, engaged to be married, apparently, stopped at the motel, there was talk. When they stayed at the motel for a week, there was more talk. Strange people they were, and did strange things. On drugs, said Britches. Satanists, said the motel owner. Goddamn hippies or something. When the young man, who couldn't have been more than twenty-five, was wandering about looking for a place to buy toothpaste, Henry happened by, holding his empty whisky barrel on a shoulder, and a fat cigar between his lips. Their paths met, and after some casual conversation Henry knocked the man down with a slap to the jaw and walked on. The young man got up several moments later, dusted himself off, and rubbed his jaw.

"What was that?" he asked a passerby.

"He's called Henry" the passerby replied.

"What's the smell?"

"He smells like that."

"Oh."

The town bar was one of those homey homely places that's more a social symptom than business enterprise. Everyone, except the young man whose name was Joseph McCall, and who nursed a beer with one hand and a swelling jaw with another, was a regular. Due to his irregularity and unfortunately for his inquisitive intentions, everybody stared at him for a good five minutes after he walked in, then, by unspoken consensus, they began to speak loudly amongst themselves of the peculiarly shaped clouds that had been seen hovering just the other day over yonder mountain. During this time Joseph finished off two beers which he had been grudgingly served (a bar is a business enterprise, after all) by the bartender.

"Who's Henry?" asked Joseph as he was served his third.

"Oh, Henry, hm?" replied the bartender.

"Yeah."

"Oh, Henry. I wouldn't bother him if I were you. He has a mean temper."

"I noticed."

"Oh. So that his work you sportin' there on the chin?"

"Asked him where I could get some toothpaste."

"Aah that'd do 'er. Guy don't like people all that much. Just in town buyin' his booze and smokes."

With that the bartender retreated and occupied himself with cleaning some clean glasses. Joseph stepped out onto the dusty pavement. His jaw throbbed purple and bled a little. Fuck toothpaste, he thought. There were a few unhappy trees on the way back to the motel. He went into number four, where his fiancée was laying on the bed watching commercials on the TV with bad reception, and sat down next to her.

"Get the toothpaste baby?" she asked.

"Nah, fuck toothpaste. You can wash with soap."

The girl stared at the television with a vague smile on her mouth. "Alright," she said, "What's for dinner?"

"We have tuna left from yesterday."

"Oh! I love tuna, my darling!" she said. "And what happened to your face? What a pretty purple."

"Some fuckin' asshole the name of Henry," said Joseph in an affected drawl.

"Well I never! You gonna stand fer that mister?"

"I tell ya, sure as yer panties is pink I ain't!"

"Well I tell you what, I'll go out and get toothpaste and antibiotic cream for that face of yours, and you prescribe for yourself whatever the doctor thinks best." Joe's fiancée pulled on a pair of jeans and walked out, and Joe did some Georgia hillbilly and watched TV. When his fiancée returned a half-hour later, he was asleep. She anointed him with white Neosporin, careful to keep a crisp line down the middle of his face, right side white, left pink. Then she lathered his neck with the colors switched, and unbuttoned his shirt and had started on his chest when the tube ran out. She admired her newly checkered man and watched the infomercials and fell asleep with her cheek on his white breast and her breast on his limp arm.

He was gone when she woke up as the sun was going down, and the pillow he'd slipped under her head was covered with the same drugged cream smeared across her cheek. She called for him and he didn't answer, so she went to the room's dirty little bathroom and washed her face, then out onto the wooden wrap-around patio to see the sun set. Joseph was walking up Mainstreet with another tube of antibiotic ointment. His purple menace had grown, swelling and splitting its dried creamy adversary and spreading freely onto his naked neck and unprotected left side of his face. He opened the tube as he walked and smothered his affliction in medication.

"I think you missed some spots," he said. His swollen skin twitched in pain as the tips of his fingers grazed broken skin. "I had to get some more."

"Let's go to bed," she said, "if it's worse in the morning we can drive out to see a decent doctor."

"That'll be a long drive."

The elements of the wound, which, from a distance, resembled some sort of mauve chiton, resolved at a closer distance into a horrific and multifarious conglomerate of human decay, half covered in a thick layer of white paste, half naked and clinging to the stubbled underside of Joseph's chin. The swelling where he had been struck hadn't gone down, and the duly stretched skin cracked and bled. He went inside and vomited and went to sleep.

Getting out of bed the next morning, Joseph found, was a rather difficult affair, as his face had been glued rather thoroughly to the pillow by dried excretion. Being a rational person, he reasoned that by peeling half of his face off along with the pillow, he would be able to remove a large portion of his infected flesh. He did so and went to the bathroom to observe himself in the mirror. The marbled crimson of exposed muscle oozed with healthy blood. It looked clean, but the blight lurked around the edges, eying his fresh flesh and seeming to slither inwards even as he watched. He took some Percocet and carefully covered himself again in white, then looked again in the mirror. One eye was swelling shut and would probably be itching if he wasn't already numb. The other was bloodshot and twitched. The rest of his face was immaculately creamy.

There was a note on the door from his fiancée: "Went to get meds. You looked like shit. I'll be back noonish."

A few townsfolk going about their morning rituals saw Joseph, his face bleeding under its medicinal mask, walk up the road in a bathrobe and boxers with a hunting knife in his fist. They saw him turn up that dead-end road, four miles from its end and already winded, then they found him again two days later half way back with a rotting face, naked and dead. He had left Henry face down on the floor with the hunting knife in his back, They found fifty-seven dollars and seven cents at the bottom of a barrel in the corner.

Joseph's fiancée never came back. Everybody said she knew.

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