... Brent Weinbach. Orphaned on the streets
of Mexicali by a nice German tourist lady who couldnt be sussed
to get an abortion. Found by La Gorda on a shopping trip back when she
was mostly mobile. Raised on curdled mothers milk, off-key narcocorridos
and Oedipal wet dreams.
... In short, a guy you would cross the street
to avoid. And then youd sell your house and move to Guam.
#
... Brent tugged on the sleeves of his threadbare
suit jacket as he left the Aces and Eights card room, tugged on the lapels,
and smoothed out his T-shirt, the one with the iron-on that read U.S.
Drinking Team. From his jeans, he removed a box of toothpicks and
set one in the corner of his mouth. Then he almost got run over by a big,
black 56 Cadillac Fleetwood hearse.
... The hearse slammed to a halt in the dirt
parking lot, its hood ornament just a nuzzle away from Brents balls.
The dust clouds tickled Brents nose. The old man behind the wheel
glared at him, but as the dust settled in the waning sunlight, Brent watched
as the color drained out of the old mans face and his eyes bugged
from his head. Brent smirked around his toothpick and strolled around
to the passengers side window.
... You oughtta watch where Im
goin, old fella, Brent said.
... The old man said nothing, just kept staring
at him, hands locked at ten and two. His mouth was open just a bit. Brent
looked down at the firm little piece in the passengers seat. Hi
there, Brent said.
... Go fuck yourself, she said.
... But why should I have all the fun?
Brent said and laughed, Hey, pops, you oughtta keep a tighter leash
on your granddaughter here.
... The old man stared. Despite it all, Brent
was getting the creeps, not a feeling he was used to. Giving, sure, but
not getting. This started to piss him off, a feeling he was very much
used to, one he relished. He leaned in the window and looked at the old
man over the rims of his sunglasses. You got somethin you
wanna say to me, daddy-o?
... The old man stared.
... Yeah, I thought not. He grinned
back at the little piece. You like older men, sugar booger? Hell,
I can be as old as you want me to be.
... She fumed silently at him. Normally,
Brent would rise to this sort of challenge. But right now, he was only
horny enough to fuck a willing piece. He figured he should lay off the
pot, maybe. Right, he said, you two have a goodun.
And then he fucked off into the dusk.
... Lily looked over at Dumble. The
fuck was that all about? Why didnt you feed him his own balls?
... Dumbles jaw quivered.
... What? Lily said.
... That was him, Dumble murmured,
That was the one.
... One what?
... But Dumble just sat there. Lily had been
scared before, had spent a good chunk of her girlhood being scared. But
seeing Dumble like this now, the blood of his enemies still fresh on his
knuckles, the smell of victory still in the air like napalm, yet he was
cowed as a kitten in a kennel. Man, it really pissed her off.
... Her slap across his face was like a bullwhip.
Dumbles eyes blurred and then re-focused and the Light poured in
again. And the Light said, unto he: Pull your fucking head out of
your ass, and lets do this already.
... Dumble wisely acquiesced.
#
... Once upon a time in Mexico, La Gordas
boy Brent Weinbach slaughtered musicians all the way from Nuevo Leon to
Tijuana. It wasnt that he didnt like musiche was actually
quite partial to the work of Ronnie James Dio, particularly the early
Rainbow stuffand it wasnt that he was assassinating musicians
willy-nilly. Brent was on a mission. Kind of a censorship mission, truth
be told, though even Tipper Gore might not approve of the methods applied.
A mission to stamp out all the mention of La Gorda from narcocorridos
and those who sang of her.
... It has been fifteen years since the name
La Gorda was sung in a Mexican ballad. Before that, there were many. Songs
of her former beauty. Songs of her drug trafficking days. Songs of her
time as an assassin. Songs of her girth. La Gorda liked things kept on
the down-low, but grudgingly accepted her musical infamy as tradition.
When word of a concept album done in honor of her deeds reached her ears,
however, things changed, and Brent was dispatched to kill all involved,
along with their families, and any stray artista de la música norteña
who dared warble out her name on promise of coin.
... Truth be told, La Gorda could not really
be blamed for striking out so harshly, as some pretty slanderous things
were sung with her name attached, such as this verse, from a particular
narco sung by a green velour leisure-suit wearing group by the name of
Los Cochinos del Amor, and loosely translated from the Spanish:
... Before she grew so corpulent
... And La Gorda became her name
... She was a true Mexican beauty
... Unfortunately afflicted with genital
warts
... Whether or not La Gorda was indeed afflicted
with genital warts (I know through unfortunate personal experience that
she was) was not the issue. The issue was that it was not to be sung about
all over the land of her birth and into her adopted homeland. Brent spent
six months killing Mexican bands and collecting the penises of the band
members as warning to any future would-be balladeers: La Gorda can do
much, much more than just give you dick lumps. It was on this long mission,
some twenty severed dicks in, that Brent had his first encounter with
Calvin Dumble.
... Even the staunchest followers of Calvin
Dumble wonder what exactly drove him to the bunker that Red-scared Daddy
Dumble built in the backyard of the family homestead decades earlier.
The talk of apocalyptic premonition is fact, but the deeper truth is that
the demons Dumble hid from for ten years were his own. The apocalypse
he sensed was the collapse of his own mind, identity and sanity, further
encouraged by the communion of vodka and bad acid he took down with him
in his distressed state. I put myself at risk expounding this theory,
and have sequestered myself away from public scrutiny and the arms (lethal
or otherwise) of the indoctrinated followers of Rev. Dumble. And so, with
only minor fear of reprisal, I present the tragic secret origin of Calvin
Dumble, until now whispered only amongst bar-dwelling old men over piss-tasting
beer and Wild Turkey shots.
... Calvin was a young man without faith,
despite the religion Daddy Dumble tried to literally beat into him as
a boy.
... But how could there be a God, an afterlife,
when all Calvin saw every day was death and her work laid out at Daddy
Dumbles mortuary? Corpses touched up, wounds covered, in a pathetic
attempt to make the dead human one final time? If this method couldnt
work for Zsa Zsa Gabor, what hope did the rest of us have? Calvin found
it all cruel and sad and he wanted no part of the family business, nor
the family faith.
... His mother had passed when he was young,
his father when Calvin was a man of thirty. Driven by a need to flee and
an old-world sense of adventure, Calvin left the Dumble homestead in the
care of his fathers assistant, Tyson Tolard, and took a chunk of
his inheritance with him to Mexico.
... As it so happens with stubborn men, it
takes the love of a stubborn woman to see things more clearly. Her name
was Esmerelda, and she was a native of a small town in the state of Guanajuato
that for the sake of propriety shall remain nameless. Calvin had come
to the town on what he thought was a whim, but later pegged for divine
intervention. He was an immediate hit amongst the local señoritas,
as the majority of the young male population had fled to work in a chicken-processing
plant across the border. Esmerelda, the fairest daughter of all Guanajuato,
ran a sewing co-op, making uniforms for Mexican musicians, including her
father, who sang and played a sweet marimba in Los Cochinos del Amor.
... Esmerelda taught Calvin to love the Lord
in a way that his father could not. The pair married and gave birth to
a daughter, Lucy, who was the first one killed some nine years later when
Brent Weinbach came into town with his guns, his dick-cutting knife, and
his strict instructions to wipe out all connected to Los Cochinos del
Amor.
... Calvin saw Brent coming, saw trouble
in his beady eyes, saw the jar of dicks under one arm, the .45 in his
hand. He saw Brent too late, though, and was unable to do naught but get
gut-shot. He was the only town occupant to regain consciousness.
... He returned home some months later, having
been treated by a doctor from a neighboring town, the ghosts of his dead
ever with him. He fired Tyson Tolard, and hid from all but Jesus, for
Jesus was all he had left. He emerged transmogrified, a decade older,
damaged, seeing things that werent there, and with nothing in his
heart and mind but a Bible verse. Luke 19:27.
... But those mine enemies, which would not
that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.
... And with Jesus riding shotgun, demons
in his crosshairs, Dumble began the slaughter.
... We now return to the present...well,
the past, but closer to the present than the parts of the tale you just
read. There is action coming, so do stick around.
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