My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

11. yoo hoo! buzz called out. y'all got any crиme de cacao?

Yoo-hoo! Buzz called out. Y'all got any crиme de cacao? Muriel, skinny, sweating, fanning herself with a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, observed Buzz through the screen door. Come inside, Buzz, she said, it's too hot to holler. She was wearing a pair of faded madras shorts and one of her father's white button-down shirts — its tails knotted just above her navel, her bare midriff a taut circumference of translucent flesh glazed with perspiration. If you came to murder me, you're too late — I'm already dead from heat prostration.

Buzz loped in, doffed his baseball cap, stanched his wet brow with a sleeve, replaced the cap on his head, and grinned at Muriel.

But Grandma told Buzz to leave the room. When Grandma told Buzz to leave the room he fell to the floor and kissed her feet, begging her to let him stay. Buzz, you'd slobber over an old woman's varicose veins just so she'd let you stay in the room, wouldn't you? Grandma asked contemptuously.

Yes, Buzz whimpered.

Grandma rolled up a magazine and hit Buzz on the side of the head… Buzz's mask was knocked loose. There was no skin beneath that mask. There were two white eyeballs protruding on stems from a mass of oozing blood-red musculature.

Grandma smoothed her hair back with spit and the palm of her hand. Honey, she said to me, go to my vanity table and fetch me my jar of cold cream and catfish slime… I'm old, children, my wooden leg's sequoia and you can count its rings. Child, she said to Muriel, fetch the TV Guide and read me what's on.

Muriel got the TV Guide, flipped to Tuesday 8 P.M., and read aloud: "The Making of Jeanne d'Arc II" chronicles the abortive attempt by a pair of Israeli sleaze merchants to produce a sequel to the 1431 original which catapulted the amenorrheic daughter of a Domrйmy farmer into international superstardom.

Nah, said Grandma, I think I've seen that one.

Muriel read on: "Daddy Promised Us Salami and Eggs, the Cunning Pragmatist" — a guy who's out one day innocently having a chicken chimichanga all by himself at a restaurant politely excuses himself from the table and goes to the men's room and someone sidles up to him at the urinal and injects him in the right buttock with a powerful designer drug that leaves him cataleptic but fully sentient and sells him for $100,000 to the Museum of Natural History where he's dressed as a Netsilik Eskimo and imprisoned in a glass-encased exhibit with a paraffin Netsilik woman and six paraffin huskies who are harnessed to a low-rider sled with hydraulic runners and a scrimshaw steering wheel and to ensure that he does not waste away, he's given intravenous nutrients every night by a horrible man with rotten teeth who reeks of cheap schnapps, and his son and his daughter-in-law do absolutely nothing to notify either the police or the media, which confirms his original suspicion that they are accessories to his abduction and partook of a portion of the $100,000, and the greedy amoral bastards have the temerity to bring his sweet grandson Douglas to the museum to gawk and gesticulate at him — starring Brian Keith, Buddy Ebsen, Nipsey Russell, and Lesley Ann Warren.

Nah, said Grandma, what else is on?

There's a show called "A Tumult of Pubic Hair and Bobbing Flaccid Penises as Sweaty Naked Chubby Men Run from the Sauna Screaming: Snake! Snake!"

What's that about?

It's pretty much like the title says — there's a snake in a sauna and it scares a group of chubby men who run naked and screaming and they show a lot of pubic hair and bobbing penises that are really really flaccid.

And who's in it!

It also stars Brian Keith, Buddy Ebsen, Nipsey Russell, and Lesley Ann Warren.

Nah, said Grandma, I'm just gonna go up and hit the sack. Child, send Buzz up to read me my bedtime story.

By the time Buzz got upstairs to Grandma's bedroom she was already under the covers.

Buzz, she said, fetch me my bedtime book.

Buzz went to the bookcase and fetched Grandma's beautiful leather-bound edition of Nocturnal Narratives for Retirees.

What would you like to hear tonight, Grandma?

I'd like to hear "The Medicine-Chest Killers."

Buzz scanned the table of contents, flipped to the appropriate page, cleared his throat, and began: "The deformation bomb was the most insidious bomb ever developed by the Pentagon. It was a bomb that changed the shape of things. A bomb that warped the line. A bomb that corrugated the smooth. Its impact coursed across the land like the wind which row by row bends the field of ripe corn and it gnarls and buckles every shape in its path and it does not distinguish between the animate and the inanimate. Two men known as the medicine-chest killers were riding in a car. They saw the flash. They heard its dampened pop. They saw the wave of distortion sweep towards them like the wind which row by row bends the field of ripe corn. They felt it pass over their car. Laughing roguishly, they drove on — their car misshapen and pleated, their spines wildly zigzagged, their fingers veering off at the knuckles in a welter of oblique angles, their cigarettes dangling from their lips like smoldering corkscrews. They arrived at an isolated farmhouse. They snuck upstairs. As usual, they headed straight for the medicine chest and they popped all the pills: the Excedrin, the estrogen, Pamprin, Percodan, Ex-Lax, Zantac, they knocked back the last two tetracyclines with swigs of Halley's M.O. Downstairs they tied their victims' hands behind their backs with dental floss, they blindfolded them with surgical gauze…"

Just skip to the end, boy, I'm too sleepy to follow that plot, Grandma interrupted groggily.

Buzz flipped to the final page: "And the one thousand begin entering heaven: Ozzy Osbourne, Cynthia Ozick, Tommy John, etc. etc., each with the solitary clang of a coin falling into an empty bank."

Buzz glanced over the book towards Grandma. Sure enough, she was fast asleep. He quietly returned the volume to the bookshelf, turned off the light, and tiptoed out of the room.

He went downstairs, he put his mask back over his hideous face, and he went to see if Muriel had found any crиme de cacao.