... Brent Weinbach. Orphaned on the streets of Mexicali by a nice German tourist lady who couldn’t be sussed to get an abortion. Found by La Gorda on a shopping trip back when she was mostly mobile. Raised on curdled mother’s milk, off-key narcocorridos and Oedipal wet dreams.
... In short, a guy you would cross the street to avoid. And then you’d 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 Brent’s balls. The dust clouds tickled Brent’s 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 man’s face and his eyes bugged from his head. Brent smirked around his toothpick and strolled around to the passenger’s side window.
... “You oughtta watch where I’m 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 passenger’s 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 good’un.” And then he fucked off into the dusk.
... Lily looked over at Dumble. “The fuck was that all about? Why didn’t you feed him his own balls?”
... Dumble’s 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. Dumble’s 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 let’s do this already.”
... Dumble wisely acquiesced.

#

... Once upon a time in Mexico, La Gorda’s boy Brent Weinbach slaughtered musicians all the way from Nuevo Leon to Tijuana. It wasn’t that he didn’t like music—he was actually quite partial to the work of Ronnie James Dio, particularly the early Rainbow stuff—and it wasn’t 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 Dumble’s mortuary? Corpses touched up, wounds covered, in a pathetic attempt to make the dead human one final time? If this method couldn’t 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 father’s 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 weren’t 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.