Captains Outrageous

Joe R. Lansdale
1

I made a last round and met Leonard in the break room. He had his security guard cap cocked at a jaunty angle and was standing in front of the soda machine, counting out change.

When I came in he said, without looking up, “You got a quarter?”

I gave him a quarter.

“Any chickens try to break out?” I asked.

“Nope. None tried to break in either. How about on your side? Any trouble?” Leonard pushed the button on the soda machine and a Dr. Pepper dropped out.

“No chicken problems. I saw a suspicious wood rat out by the trees, but he didn’t want any part of me.”

“Well, I can see that.”

I went over and made myself a cup of free decaf because I’d just given Leonard my last quarter. I put lots of free creamer in it. The coffee at the chicken plant needs lots of creamer so it doesn’t taste like something dead.

I stirred the coffee in the Styrofoam cup with a plastic swizzle stick and sipped it. It still tasted like something dead, only with creamer in it. I dropped the full cup in the trash and we went out to Leonard’s pickup.

We had been working at Deerstone’s Chicken Processing for about six months, and it wasn’t so bad. We had the three-in-the-afternoon-to-midnight shift. Mostly you just walked around and made sure there weren’t any holes in the fence and nothing was out of place and you didn’t see workers packing their car trunks with frozen chickens.

It beat one chicken plant I tried to get on at. They didn’t want me as a security guard, but thought I’d be great out at their farm, masturbating roosters for sperm to impregnate hens. No joke. They really did that, or so they said. I tried to imagine if they had you do it with tweezers and gloves, or if you had to do it with a naked thumb and forefinger. Perhaps it was better for the chickens that way.

When you spent a lot of time walking around outside a dark building and inside where chicken slaughter was going on, you thought about all kinds of possibilities. And in the middle of the night, edging on toward the big twelve, a lot of dumb ideas seemed reasonable.

The guard job had come through an acquaintance who was quitting and said they needed two. I had to get gun-certified, way it’s offered in Texas, and Leonard, who already had the certification, got the job with me. We were the last hard bastion between the chickens inside the processing plant (most of them already dead, headless, defeathered, and on hooks) and the outside world who wanted them.

Let me tell you, these chicken people aren’t messing around. They’re serious about their fowls. They got all kinds of processing methods they hold dear and don’t want stolen.

Processing plant across town, the one wanted me to jack off chickens, lived in mortal fear of spies from Deerstone’s. So fearful, in fact, Leonard and I liked to imagine they would send their own chickens over for secrets. You know, dressed in black ninja outfits, going over the fence and the wall, with metal cleats on wings and feet, climbing through ventilation shafts, ready to pluck out secret information after formidable nunchaku battles in elevators and dark places with Deerstone’s own chickens.

Yes sir, sort of made you feel proud when you went home at night, put your dark green guard suit, hat, and holstered handgun on a chair, lay down in bed, smelling of chicken, knowing you kept the world safe from meat processing thieves. That and the fact you got a decent check every two weeks and a sexy uniform to dazzle the female population.

Well, decent money depends on what you’ve been doing before. Bouncing sometimes paid better, but you had to hang out with a bunch of drunks in a smoky joint full of naked women, and after a while the naked women were just bothersome. You wanted them to put clothes on. I can’t explain it. It’s just one of those strange things in life. You start to think you wouldn’t have to bounce in the first place, throw drunks in the parking lot, if they didn’t serve alcohol in there and have naked women running around shaking their tits and sticking their bush in everyone’s face.

Then you realize if the place wasn’t like that, you wouldn’t have a job. It’s a bit like being a preacher. If there wasn’t any sin you’d be hosing down oil at a filling station. Which, come to think of it, in either case, bouncer or preacher, was sure to be a more honorable profession.

Way I felt lately, naked women were one of life’s miseries. I hadn’t seen my woman, Brett, naked in some time. Fact was, I wasn’t sure she was my woman anymore. And what I had done for her had changed my life, made me blue and sorry and sad about the needs of the flesh. It was my feelings for her, both emotional and physical, that had got me in some business that had resulted in deaths. I dreamed about those people at night. They came to me in bursts of gunfire, powder smoke, and screams. Their faces were huge and they howled at me with mouths open so wide I could see fillings in their teeth, and beyond that, the abyss into which we all go.

What I had done had a certain justification, but certain justification and justification aren’t the same thing. I had been on the edge of violence before, and had acted in self-defense before, but in this case I had gone in with the full understanding and the design that I might have to take human lives, and had. I had left there wounded with blood on my shoes.

Since Leonard had been with me on this horrid escapade, I asked Leonard if he had the same problems, the same dreams. His answer was simple. The dead people were assholes.

As for dreams? No.

After it was over, me and Brett kept in touch, made love a few times, had dinner together, went to movies. But there was something missing. Like a hamburger without the fixings. Part of it was the fact she was trying to bring her daughter, Tillie, back to normalcy.

Problem was, Tillie liked being a whore, just not a whore against her will. I guess it beat wanting to grow up and work as a politician.

Truth of the matter was, Tillie was one hell of a good whore. She was pulling down big change over in Tyler, where the Baptists liked sex good as anybody.

I liked sex too, but Brett wasn’t for it anymore. Not really. Last few times I had felt as if I were having a kind of desperate aerobic workout. You do it ’cause you think you’re supposed to and it’s good for you, but you don’t like it, and you end up sweaty for little to nothing.

I felt as if Brett ought to have a light on, be reading a magazine, have a pair of scissors at hand so she could clip coupons. Making love to her was kind of like I was trying to beat something to death with my pelvis that was already dead.

Frankly, it wasn’t the kind of loving made a man feel hard as steel, or even firm as Greek Age bronze.

Unspoken, we bled sex out of our relationship, and pretty soon we bled the relationship out of it. I had talked to her by phone a few times. She dropped by the plant at dinner break with Kentucky Fried Chicken once, but it was all pretty uninspiring. If I remember correctly, we talked about KFC’s biscuits most of the time. They’re good biscuits, by the way, but they can’t beat Popeye’s, and neither’s biscuits quite match up to a loving relationship.

After that, I saw her once more. Then all went quiet on that front, and I had pretty much decided from here on out it was the bachelor life for me.

Sex and chicken processing. Two of life’s great mysteries.

Leonard drove me around the big chicken plant lot to my car. We did this every night. I parked on one side, he on the other. If we went out the front door, he gave me a ride to my car. We went out the back, I gave him a ride to his. We could have parked side by side, of course, but we liked to add a little adventure to our lives. And it gave us a few minutes to talk about whatever we felt like talking about. Most of it just stupid stuff about the chicken plant, a quick survey of our present lives.

Since I had moved out of his place, we only saw each other at the job site these days. Weekends I enjoyed punching the heavy bag, skipping rope, and feeling sorry for myself. It had one side benefit. I had lost weight. I hadn’t been so trim since I had a stomach virus and a full week of vomiting and diarrhea. Only now I felt better and wasn’t gaining it back and I could live life without having to always be near a commode.

Leonard had a boyfriend he was seeing, and that kept him busy. I had met the guy and he seemed all right. He was a lead man at the aluminum chair factory. He wasn’t quite as macho as Leonard, but he wasn’t a skipper, as Leonard called the more effeminate gays. He was black as tar, flat-nosed and thick-lipped, balding, solid built and a little younger than Leonard. Or as Leonard liked to joke, he’s big and way black, likes slow walks in the park, and he’s got a eight-inch dick.

Leonard, as always, liked to cut to the chase.

This guy, John, he liked to just hang out mostly, and that’s what Leonard liked. That and the sex. They went down to the gym, lifted weights three times a week, went to movies and read books in bed. Probably talked about chickens and aluminum lawn furniture now and then. When it came to John, Leonard was pretty free with his vanilla cookies. I guess being a best friend and damn near brother you don’t get vanilla cookies so easy. With Leonard, you got to be like a date or something, a lead man at the aluminum chair factory, eight inches of dick and a willing disposition.

John was probably the best thing that had happened to brother Leonard, but it sure put a cramp in my life. No woman. No friend. Just a heavy bag to punch and lots of cheap food eaten with spoons out of cans.

I didn’t have a TV either and I had read all my books and didn’t have money for more. I was putting what money I had into paying for my new domicile and keeping up my half-ass pickup. I had traded in a banged-up Chevy Nova with hardened gum stuck beneath the dashboard and a rotting pack of rubbers in the glove box for it. Those rubbers and the gum had come with the car, and I had been more than glad to pass them on. The pickup was only better than the Nova in the pollution department. The Chevy Nova had damn near been a mosquito fogger.

All I had of my old life was an ancient stereo and a few playable records I’d rescued from the mess of my home after a tornado. I had one CD that had been given to me, but no CD player.

As Leonard drove me around to my car, we were heavy into a philosophical conversation. He was telling me about his love life. I said, “You like John ’cause he’s got eight inches?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s kind of shallow, ain’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re jerkin’ me again, aren’t you?”

“I’m tellin’ you it’s the same as when you buy a burrito. Big is better than small.”

“Size doesn’t mean a thing.”

“You say. What would you know? You ain’t a dick man.”

“No, but women say it doesn’t matter.”

“Women are liars. Hey, you like titties?”

“What?”

“Titties?”

“Yeah. And I see where this is going. I like any size tittie. Long as it’s a friendly tittie.”

“But you like big titties?”

“Yeah, but you’re not roping me into some bullshit here. I don’t think a woman’s got to have big hooters to be worth something.”

“Yeah, but if she’s worth something and has big hooters, you like that, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah, but that doesn’t prove anything.”

“It proves you like big titties.”

“It doesn’t prove that big titties are important.”

“I say this. I say you could maybe, at least for thirty minutes, like a woman you didn’t really like long as she had big titties and was willin’ to shuck drawers. Am I right?”

“Leonard…”

“Am I right?”

“I don’t think I’m that shallow.”

“Let’s say you’re in the mood, and she’s in the mood, and she hasn’t got visible scars or oozing sores, and she looks pretty good and she’s got them big titties. We’re not talkin’ marriage here, or takin’ advantage. We’re talkin’ she’s willin’ and she’s not too damn smart-”

“Whoa!”

“Just listen. Say, she’s got like an IQ of, oh, I don’t know. We won’t put her in like some kind of home for folks can’t figure left from right, but let’s say we’re talkin’ someone’s not gonna challenge Einstein in the smart department.”

“That’s most of us.”

“All right. You get that one. Say, she’s not any smarter than, say, a postal worker. You know, ones at the counter with their mouth open, always put up a sign says NEXT WINDOW when you walk up to their slot.”

“I can see that.”

“Say, she’s, you know, that kind of dumb. And she’s willin’. Let’s even say she ain’t the best-lookin’ thing. I don’t mean she’s got her nose on the back of her head. She doesn’t scare people. But she’s got this shape, and them big ol’ titties. She wants you to throw her the sausage. Now, you’re tellin’ me, even if she ain’t so pretty, and not so smart, she wanted you, you wouldn’t fuck her?”

“All right, I might.”

“Might, hell. You’d be on that stuff like a duck on a June bug.”

“But I might do it if she didn’t have big breasts. I mean, she’s pleasant-looking enough.”

“Then you’re sayin’ you’d bang anything?”

“I’m not sayin’ that.”

“All right, you’re not sayin’ that, then you’re sayin’ you like big titties.”

“I think this conversation is rigged.”

Leonard pulled up next to my car.

“Well,” he continued, “I like a big dick. Think about it. A big tit really doesn’t do you any good. You get to suck on it, or whatever you heteros do. Roll it around in your palms or rub your head with it. Whatever. Frankly, the thought of it kind of disgusts me. You’re not accomplishing anything there. Just buy a beach ball.”

“It’s not like that, Leonard.”

“Now, a dick, there’s somethin’s got a purpose.”

“I’ll be going now, Leonard.”

I opened the door, got out of the pickup. Leonard punched in his Johnny Cash cassette, waved at me, and drove off to the sounds of “Delia.”

Just as I unlocked my car door, tossed my cap on the seat, and was about to climb inside, I heard a weak voice in the nearby patch of woods beyond the fence.

“Help me.”