EIGHTEEN
The Not-Quite-Revenge of Fat Dude
The trailer park reminds Harriet of a graveyard. Singlewides and doublewides. Gray and white boxes. All lined up, one after the next. They're like headstones, she thinks. Or rows of tombs, each marked with dead and dying flowers.
Frankie kicks a stone. It ricochets off a rusty watering can, pelts a dirty garden gnome in his mushroom hat. "This place is disgusting."
Harriet steps up and knocks on the door of a doublewide at the end of the row.
A human mountain – his flesh a tattooed landslide in midcollapse, answers the door.
Fat Dude. More specifically, naked Fat Dude. Two fingers splinted.
His frame fills the trailer door. A fire-breathing serpent, inked and linked with another serpent, encircles his belly button crater. The second serpent runs down to Fat Dude's mammoth thigh and coils inward so that –
Frankie blanches.
"Oh, c'mon," he mumbles, shielding his eyes.
"What?" Fat Dude asks, pissed.
Frankie wrinkles his nose. "Man. You got your dick inked?"
"You lookin' at my dick?"
"Well, it's right fuckin' there!" Frankie yells, pointing. "It's like a cucumber. A sea cucumber. I think it's looking at me, to be honest with you."
Fat Dude growls, "It'll spit in your mouth if you don't quit flappin' your lips."
"You sonofabitch–"
"We need to ask you a question," Harriet interrupts, holding back Frankie.
"I don't answer questions from dykes and dagos," Fat Dude says, proud of himself.
"Fuck you, fat-sauce!" Frankie says, stepping up.
Fat Dude reaches out with his left hand – the one with unsplinted fingers – as if to grab Frankie's lower jaw and rip it off his head. His hand never gets that far.
Harriet lets out a small sigh and darts in with a fast hand, pinching one of Fat Dude's testicles between her small fingers. She squeezes like she's trying to unscrew a sparrow's head. The mountainous man yelps like a kicked puppy and swings a meaty paw at Harriet's head. She leans backward, and Fat Dude's hand cracks into the moldering doorjamb of his own trailer. His index and middle finger bend backward in a way that's wholly not natural and crack like sticks breaking under a heavy foot. He howls.
Harriet finds this terribly satisfying. Two more broken fingers. Symmetry pleases her.
She lets go of Fat Dude's empurpled nut and shoulders him backward.
It's now possible to see the rest of the trailer – the mound of dirty dishes collecting flies, the couch with fabric so rough it could grate cheese, the bathroom door that's actually just a strip of accordion plastic pulled taut and latched with a rusty hook. A real palace.
Against the back wall sits a cot bowed deep, Harriet presumes, from Fat Dude's tremendous bulk. At present, a skinny girl, maybe eighteen, maybe younger, sits watching the whole thing unfold with heavy, heroin-lidded eyes. She holds up a blanket as if to feign modesty, but one tiny tit pokes out the top with a cigar-butt nipple standing at attention, a fact to which the girl seems oblivious.
"Hold his head," Harriet commands.
Frankie grabs the biker's pale pumpkin head and slams it down against a carpet crusted with food stains and other biological blemishes.
"Now lift his head."
Once the head's back up, Harriet thrusts a photo under Fat Dude's nose. His watering eyes try to focus on it.
"This man's name is Ashley Gaynes," Harriet explains. It's a photo of Ashley at a party, laughing, a cup of something that might be beer in his hand. He and everyone else stand bathed in the glow of red Christmas lights. "A bartender across town said you might know him."
"Yeah, yeah," Fat Dude squeaks. "I know him. You shoulda just showed me the picture to begin with. I woulda rolled on that little asshole like it weren't nothing. He's the one who broke my… " He can't seem to bring himself to finish the sentence. He lifts the splinted hand off the carpet and waves it like a penguin's busted flipper.
"Gonna be tough to jerk off now," Frankie says, grinning ear to ear.
"He have a metal suitcase with him?" Harriet asks.
"No. No suitcase. Just some blonde bitch."
"Blonde?"
"Blonde like white blonde, like beach sands – a dye job. And he drives a Mustang. Early 90s. White. Back window busted out."
Harriet nods to Frankie, who lets go of Fat Dude's face. It booms into the floor like the boulder tumbling after Indiana Jones.
"That's all for now," Harriet says. "Thank you for your time."
"Fuck you people," he whimpers.
Clucking her tongue, Harriet whips the tip of her boot into Fat Dude's mouth, shattering teeth. He rolls over, coughing, blood bubbling up over his lower lip. One tooth slides out on an oozing river of red. It plops to the carpet.
"Let's go," Harriet says to Frankie, who follows after, chuckling.