L: Take this for absolute zero. ][<
Porcine Signs of Speedsville
By Gabriel Orgrease
"Sensible persons need not fear insanity as a result of motoring. But if automobiling is indulged in to excess the healthiest man may expect to find that by slow degrees his memory will become defective. Had automobiling been introduced by easy stages, the effect would not have been so detrimental. But as it is, people have plunged into a vortex of terrific speed, and they must pay the penalty." Dr. L. Pierce Clark, Nerve Specialist and Alienist, Effect of Auto Speeding, Minnetonka Record, January 11, 1907.
Oily sun a broiled mountain oyster hangin' over drooping willows and Lucy Breedlove loiters at the stone wall at the IGA thinkin' anythings to do, intermittently bored with a half hour of nothing, when her boyfriend Brent Straw, come up with his tools and weed bag from his yard job, says, "We should all walk over to Kelvin's house. I bet he get a sweaty ginger beer for each of us." Though it be a long walk walking they had nothing much better besides thirsty and so off they go off to visit their local wizard.
"He might even play us his Monkees records."
They all walks a half mile out of two when the taller Brent, who is always pacing away far ahead of Lucy, in good shape from his yard work and the occasional gig drystone wall, discovers a large lump of something prickly, something organic, that looks to be basking for a sun tan or a quickie road kill alongside the highway.
"What is that?" Lucy comes up slow to plant her twiggy teen slimness behind Brent and peer around his muscular haunches not too far removed from the sculpting of a dray mule.
"I think it a porcupine," the inquisitive yard raker says leaning over from above to get a good look at the inanimate lump, but not too close, mind you.
"You think it belongs to somebody?"
"Hey, maybe it's lost."
"It got prickers.
"It a porcupine. Watch out. It might jump and stick us," Brent speculates.
"What you think it doin' here in Speedsville, Brent?"
At first Lucy and Brent reconsider the porcupine is sleeping. They stumbles around for a bit. Then Brent roughly whacks it once good with the raw end of his rake handle. "What you do that for, you big offal?"
"I wants to wake it up," he says. "It git run over and cause somebody a tire flat."
The prickly lump gives a sort of thud and a hollow wheeze, sounds like one of those birds that flies backwards, and flumps over, motionless, it does not wake up. Whack, whack. "We better'n check it pulse, Lucy."
"I don't know how to take porcupine pulse," squeams an animated Lucy, her teeth chittering. "I ain't seen one since last time we went to the kiddie zoo down to the lake. It was spittin' at us."
No visible sign of no blood. No injuries, not a single one. No punctures, no scrapes, dings or visible bruises. No flies. No maggots. The two of them near in examining.
"I don't see no breathin'," expirates Brent. "Think it be real dead?"
"It smells like... like..."
"...a goat. Look at them tiny little eyeballs."
"Tiny is little already, Brent."
"Yeah, they is small."
"Put it in the middle of the road," says Lucy.
"What for?"
"Cars will honk they horns to wake it up."
"Oh, ok, what you say, Lucy," shaking his large head. "I suppose better than walkin'." Then again, Brent is a smarter feller, "You know, Lucy, it could git real sloppy aroun' here cars be runnin' over this here carcass an blowin' tires," removing his cap to wipe his brow. "Why don't we prop it so it look like it gonna' go in the road? Not really put in the road, you know. Then they go slam brake and swerve 'round it."
Brent and Lucy collect up a faggot of sticks from the hedgerow and begin to truss up the dead rodent. Not so particular about standing tall or standing at all, the porcupine's limp little legs keep folding up beneath and the animal continues, despite all of their youthful tenacity, to be rolling over in a deflated lump.
"Gosh."
"We should give it a name," whispers Lucy.
"What?"
"A name, needs it a name."
"What hell? Damn. You girls all same, Lucy." Brent impatiently puts in a dry willow stick bent a small V to hold up a snout.
"What you mean, Brent?" sounding tiffy.
"All you dolls got to have name." Lucy finds a clump of coltsfoot blooming in the ditch and adds a few yellow flowers. Again, the porcupine falls over.
"Don't be a stuck up pig, Brent."
"It be a dead animal, Lucy. Call it what you want. I don't want fight with you over stupid stuff."
"Porky!"
"Geeze-ass, whatever, girl!" Brent and Lucy add more shoring. "You must have gone to girl school."
"You don't like my name?"
"I don't give a flat coon bark, Lucy," rudely pushing a small stone with the tip of his worn Redwing boot against a tawny midrib, "It dead and it don't care no more what we call it. I bet it can't near hear us either."
Lucy on all fours with her hot lips down close to the dead porcupine's head in proximity of where ears might have been once listening, "Porky… Porky Porky Porky."
"Porcupine séance, voodoo girl."
Before long what the two of them end with a brown lump of twigs with a mottled assemblage of green leaves that resembles a cantankerous pricker cactus more than a posthumous porcupine named Porky.
"This not workin'," Brent frustrates and leans on his rake while Lucy whispers a stream of nothings to Porky.
"Well, what you want do?" she says pausing mid-chant to look up at Brent.
"We take it up with us to Kelvin's. Bet he can figure what."
So they roll over Porky, each of them pushing with sticks, into Brent's weed bag and they tie the mesh in a loop around the rake handle and they hold the rake up one on each shoulder with Brent in the lead and they start off down the road toward Kelvin Fahren's house. "I'll walk slowers so's you can keep up."
"You always go too fast, Brent. Good time you slow down."
They don't get too far along on the shoulder in the heat with the sun beating down on them and Brent more and more anxious, sweaty and muggy, to get along to a cold ginger beer at Kelvin's and he is struggling with the load of animal and woman, not yet too domesticated of a beast, and subconsciously he keeps hemming and tugging on the rake handle, sweat rivuling down inside his denim trouser leg to pond and squish in his size twelve sneakers, large enough to swallow Lucy, pulling at the rake handle in small and rough jerks. Porky and Lucy attached in his wake not very long of nearly a hundred feet before Lucy gets ticked, yells, jerks in reaction to the bull pace. Kicks up a terrible fuss stretched out in the dusty summer wake behind and about him.
"Damn, Brent!" Again she jerks on the rake handle, twisting Brent's right shoulder.
"Whatsup?" Brent innocently twists his mouth around to the left in order to maintain his balance, nearly dislocating his jaw in the slippery afternoon heat, not wanting to move his head, afeared of snapping vital organs, and realizing he is an awful lot more thirsty than he felt he was when they started this burdensome trek.
"Porky keeps slidin' down the rake handle."
"So, push it up."
"I can't no more. Porky keeps bumpin' my tits."
"For Kay-reest sake, Lucy. What you expect a man do talkin' like that?"
"Well, for starters, Brent, you could lower your end of the handle. It don't got to be stuck up quite so high like that."
"Oh, ok, whatever, Lucy," as Brent lowers the rake handle he is now with his arm down and his hand holdin' the handle dangling below his hip.
"I want…" Lucy adjusting to the sudden change in angle reaches out to grab Porky an instant before the bugger slams into the back of Brent's calf.
Intermission, we pause, then following an equitable adjustment of angle they continue on to Kelvin Fahren's house.
"Wh-what you g-got there, g-guys?"
"We got us a dead porcupine that won't stand up," blurts the effervescent Lucy.
"It's name is Porky," grunts Brent with disdain as he unwraps the weed bag bundle.
Their eccentric friend Kelvin, a higher I-Q kid born on a Peking Duck farm on the south shore of Long Island and transplanted to the metropolis of Speedsville at the age of six, for undisclosed business reasons of Walter, his father, a prosperous agrarian with seven highly luminescent greeneries. To all local account, legend and rumor Kelvin Fahren is a whiz prodigy with a skill in devising magic devices and fake armaments made out of inner-tube bands, faucet washers, screw drivers, nitrous oxide and tin cans.
He says to anyone that drops by that he took one of those International Correspondence Courses on culvert and wooden roller coaster design and we know from experience he can spout snappy words like flexural members, moment, shear, diameter, pumpkin pie, deflection and equilibrium. All terms, particularly when Kelvin uses them, considered mysterious amongst his friends. Especially made special for the tortuous manner by which Kelvin gets around to exuding his more eloquent words and the more diffident concepts of the Practical Handbook of Mammiform Alchemy.
Everyone here 'bouts readily admitting they have no idea what Kelvin is really gibbering, excepting for Brent, and again Lucy dissimulates understanding, being self-consciously admiring of Kelvin's ample, though low slung, gnomish posterior. For everyone it is evident that technical terminology in a critical context always sounds real important and precise, and thusly, Kelvin often thrusts forward blindly into dead ends, dead zones, flat spots of dull narrative, where he should be wise to follow.
Comforting to know there is a word for everything we cannot figure. Our lives surrounded by an unexplored ozone of boogey men and woodland beasts, goblins, spiders and faeries, sprites, bytes and cons that we nothing know of; the comfort we find with Kelvin an assurance that in some small measure we can imagine he has been to spaces where we have never ever as much as dreamed to be avoiding.
"You ar… art… arti-culate this object w-w-won't endendure a vertical play-cement?"
In unison Brent and Lucy, "No, no Kelvin. It just won't stand up."
"I prop… prop-hose we depa-part to the subter-subtrainanean v-vault and s-situate this unique s-specimen in the ca-cavernous ch… ch… ch… ch… iller. This is n-numerous epocyclones s-supplementary in curi-rio-city than the the f-feral hog. I consider we can we can eva-eva-cu-hate a s-substantive v-volume to formulate a d-discharged s-span."
"What?"
Brent, who since second grade has known Kelvin, where they met abruptly, as kids often do, on the playground one recess when Brent fell head first, hanging upside down from the jungle gym, landed on Kelvin's stomach and sharply jabbed his elbow into his newly acquired friend's throat, which was a lot better than slamming his head into concrete, which action of personal sacrifice and bad timing led to a lifelong bonding, quickly interjects, "He says we can put the porcupine in the freezer in the basement."
"Oh. What will that do?"
Kelvin withdraws from a nearby drawer three pair of leather mule gloves, like he is prepared for this dirty work ahead of time, and passes two of them pair out each to Lucy and Brent, "F-follow me," as Kelvin gingerly hoists Porky with a rusty hay hook then moves swiftly toward the door to the basement stair, "S-science b-beckons, my dear."
"What about me?"
"T-the dun-dun-geon b-beckons y-you to-toot B-Brent. On-onvard!"
"What are the goggles for, Kelvin?" an inquisitive Lucy as they feel their way along the wooden stairs leading to the stone floor of the dank and dark basement.
"I esteem the cer-certain-tee of what I d-distinguish with my eyes s-superior than the absolute panopanoplay of n-natural animal s-senses or any p-part or p-propo-torsion thereof, of of course, not d-disregarding be-by any agency of co-computraytion the magmamagnitude of of the s-snout."
"Oh. Ok."
Kelvin in the basement pulls the cord of the overhead bulb above the freezer and the incandescent turns on. In the dark they could do their chores but you would not be able to see them and the task would be a many more times more thorny undertaking. We could have hi-intensity fluorescent full-spectrum gro-lights at this point in the story, Mr. Fahren, the wealthy agrarian, can certainly afford them for more than his wacky backy cash crop, but a forty watt bulb dangling from a wire and swinging gently, throwing lazy shadows in slow motion behind the relatively stationary hunched over figures of Kelvin, Lucy, and Brent straining at the impending precipice of the freezer lends a more sinister aspect to their activities that would be had, say, if everything were lit with four pair of 1000-watt metal halide lamps.
Not everything needs to be seen clearly to be appreciated. As they, and we with them, can now clearly enough see what they are doing at the freezer the three of them line up in a row, taking a firm grasp on the appliance, Kelvin at the chrome handle, they then open the massive box unit, a full sixteen cubic feet of modern electrical ice chest.
They are met with a whammo blasting front of cold air that chills the bone, jiggers the skull, densifies the cranium, and frosts the foundation stones around them. Lucy shivers, Brent's fledgling shadow of a mustache frosts in crystalline clumps, and Kelvin's enhanced goggles cloud to a blizzard white blindness.
"Ad-Admiral P-Pearwee! W-we will h-hiatus at t-this jum-junc-ture to tw-tweak."
Ok, now our crew just stands here and waits. Here is a period of time in which there is nothing worth reporting. If you want to know about the breeding habits of sow bugs, or the leaden muffle of bunny slippers on the wooden floor above, well, they are irrelevant. If we could fashion a semblance of silence in words then here is where it would be put, once and for all. Nothing is going on. We are waiting.
Then something. A nervous muscular twitch, or gas, whatever, nothing stays put in an absolute zone of motionless matter, which is about, as far as nothing for Kelvin is concerned, as cold as everything can get. Damned cold! Hellishly cold!
Fully adjusted to the temperature differential, and hoisting up the scale on Kelvin's direction the trio shifts white frozen packages around, "If the c-component weighs a r-reduced amount of three tree p-pounds s-subsequently porporsiton it to the l-left, the heavier m-matter to relo-relocate tward the f-further d-deasil. I'll elieliminate this outsizled c-collec-cchun o' pork and c-con-sign it to the c-cis-stern."
Kelvin huffs and puffs for a few grunts, giving Lucy and Brent a pause to rest their ears, lifting what looks like a whole suckling pig wrapped in white butcher paper, drags the object with a solid thud on the sandstone floor off into a cavernous dimness, then returns to the freezer shortly after Lucy and Brent hear a splashing sound of water echoes, "We O-ought a-after that d-delivery to to obtain s-sufficient L-libartee." The operation of moving packages is quickly executed more from Lucy following Brent's motion; they establish a rhythm of picking up and setting down in unison, than from Kelvin's verbally erratic commandments.
"Po-pisiton the l-legs up, app-approxi-mating this," says Kelvin, as to the porcupine's small paws he secures white cotton filaments to hold them erect, placing downcast the porcupine with backside in the bowels of the freezer carefully nestled.
At Kelvin's urging they retire to listen to a half tuned FM radio and with it they count invisible, but some noisome, meteors. Quickly bored and wanting more excitement they time the fall of 700 dominoes. They shoot off Kelvin's stink gun at the IGA meat counter to the apparent bemusement of the butcher. Fourteen hours of ping pong, a long series of question marks, two nights of unrest, and a respite in Kelvin's sky-blue Falcon to the Stop n' Shop in Slaterville Springs where they loiter, play pinball and eat very very salty beef jerky.
Two indigested days of television including the Three Stooges, Have Rocket, Will Travel. When two bodies meet in space they collide. A rocket sent across the pond to be cleaned and polished. Oh, another ten million exasperated. Gigantic tarantulas shooting misdirected energy rays, unicorns stuck with their heads wedged in a rocky crack, and three clones singing in a miniature bird cage. A gaggle of tepid action to report here in a small space.
The threesome, using a bent crowbar and a three-ton screw jack as a counter-weight; extricate one Porky from the hoary chest.
"Wow, this thing is really like stiff," says Lucy, "it looks kinda like a frozen turkey with stickers."
"Gra-gra-sp these f-forceps, please," motions Kelvin to Lucy, "th-then we can s-situate our cryo-crygenic s-specimen in this p-potable K-Coleman k-cooler that I have k-crammed with d-dry ice. Identical occasion we we will be s-simultaneously able to s-sex this diminutive bugger."
"Oh, goody! How do you sex a bugger?"
"Don't fergit your gloves," nods Brent to Lucy, "that dry ice burns like hell."
"I want to see this."
"D-don't TOUCH it! P-put on these ga-gog-gles and and, if you you do'nt mind, s-slip in this but-but-cher p-paper under you’re your blouse," warns Kelvin as he hands over the fogged utensils to Lucy, "You k-can n-never have enough rough p-protection."
The cooler stowed in the Falcon they drive leisurely out of Speedsville a few miles to the east and park themselves inconspicuously on a dirt side road. While Brent goes off into the woods to commune with nature, "I can't work under pressure," he says, Lucy and Kelvin hoist the frozen animal out of the back of the car and carry it to the side of the main road into Speedsville, West Creek Road, where they prop it up on the shoulder like it is about to absent mindedly walk forward on stage.
"My mom says I get an uncle drives a rocket engine car," Lucy chattering as they arrange things just so.
"A a l-largely p-precipit-lous and marv-marvelous asp-asp-iration to rup-rup-ture the t-terrestrial velo-velo-city of highest h-humanoid achi-achi-evement," says Kelvin.
"Yeah, he does things fast. She says he uses it to turn telephone poles into toothpicks."
"A s-striking mis-misdirection of r-resources."
"He don't live around here 'cause she says it ain't flat enough and too many rocks to drive into. Rocks and rocket cars don't mix good."
"But for they are t-tunneling to the n-nucleus of this p-planet, elabororately una-unavoidable."
"I once saw him on television in a commercial right after I Dream of Genie."
"I-is t-that s-so," blubbering slightly under the weight of their exertion.
"Kelvin?"
"Yy-yeah, L-lucy."
"What happens if you throw a rock at a rocket car?"
"P-pebbles."
They go conceal themselves. Kelvin crouches behind a big rock, certainly large enough to necessitate it being missed by a wayward rocket car. Lucy in a bed of Black-Eye Susan. Brent, having returned from draining the mickey, climbs up high the toppymost top of a tall white pine where he quickly gets his hands mucky muck with sap.
"My indi-indi-spen-sable f-friend, B-Brent, the interinterior b-bark at the s-subordinate extremity of this P-Pinus S… S… Strobus you have ele-ele-cted to esca-esca- late gives the impro-impre-shun to me of b-being a dimu-dmin-intuitive instant-ant pre-previously nibbled nibbled by teeth teeth of a fami-fami-shed inse-insec-tivore. You p-perhaps will h-hanker-anker after gauging-ing for arsenic arsenic before li-licking that p-pitch from your i-impending s-sticky digits."
The first vehicle come up is dirt poor Danielle Tracey returning from the Old '76 Club, a buxom bevvy that can add numbers in her head faster'n you can spit them out, sittin' slumpy on her Farmall H pulling an half-empty manure spreader on a half tank of tequila. The tractor barks. Danielle, playin' a mathematical caesura in her head, just swerves around and keeps right on going past like propped up Porky is not even on her radar. "Did you see that?" says Lucy, "She even never slowed down."
"Cripes, Lucy, she wasn't going that fast to begin," shouts down Brent as he struggles with wiping his sticky hands on his pant leg, "We be here all day waitin', girl."
"S-shlush," says Kelvin, "here k-comes an alt-alternative."
"An alter what?" says Lucy peeking her blonde head up above golden rod and milk thistle.
"Shugup!" jumbles a struggling Brent who now has one hand stuck to his hair and the brim of his cap hanging from his mouth like a large green bill that flaps when he tries talking.
"You don't got to be so damned nasty, Brent," as Lucy crouches down in the flowers.
Next come an out-of-towner in a Buick, least ways, Brent says it's a Blueb... ick yet Kelvin clearly indicates it's a polee-oly-opia of Ka-Ka-dillack and has that sort of s-sour look on his f-forface that comes with a detailed exp-planation.
Lucy says she doesn't give a crap what kind of car it is, "It got a big tookus on it with a lot of Jesus Love stuff alls I know."
The elderly driver of the everlasting gospel of locomotion of metal and glass and internal combustion does not see Porky until the last minute when he slams on the brakes.
"God damned to hell," he says.
His girlfriend, the poltergeist Mrs. Levy with golden-white hair, multicolored eye-sockets, mascara, sunglasses with blue lenses, in the passenger seat rudely lunges forward. She bangs her stiff bouffant, a pink puffy of preserved cotton candy, on the dashboard. Squeezing the thickness of her unopened bible between her legs. Her head bounces back as her ample torso is returned into the leatherette seat. "Oh, my, do that again, Jimmy?" But God and Jimmy got no time for this foolishness. Jimmy hits the accelerator. "Oh, my, oh my!" They speed on towards Speedsville for the chicken barbecue before Lucy and Kelvin and Brent can hear the reverend's unmeasured reply.
Brent up in the pine tree is laughing and pulling on his hair an he leans back. Next thing he is hanging upside down with one leg hooked on one branch an the other hooked on another. He is ok 'cause he keeps laughing. Kelvin also laughing behind the big stone is wiping with a red rag at a dark spot on his trousers, his goggles up on his forehead. Lucy is gone crazy giggling and wailing and rolling around crushing flowers. This is the best time anybody had at Speedsville since the artesian well running out of the rusty pipe next-door the community center got mixed with the broken Gennie Cream Ale truck and the Dr. Dan's Dancing Hungarian Bear got loose and pranced around town for most of the afternoon chasing the itinerant pot-holder lady, scared out of her wits, and the sauerkraut eating competition was won by Mabel Hornstit, and they held the annual privy burning celebration all in one day.
Next come Bruce Peabody in his original '46 Chevy PU who slows down and leans across the seat and while gently gliding the truck around the minor obstruction shouts out the passenger window at the porcupine, "Shouzzoo! Shouzzoo! Gaffeew!"
Least way that what it sound like he shouting if you happen to be hanging upside down in a pine tree with your hand stuck up yourself an your head rapidly filling with blood, or you got flower leaves and lady bugs stuffed in your delicate ears an you suffer a confinement of conscience with an improvisation of butcher paper cuirass that keeps making crinkle noises when you wriggle. Or when the absolute Kelvin run off a bit further into the woods for the privacy to wipe dry at the inside of his damp trousers where all sounds are eminently duller.
They is about entertained out. Brent drops three more levels of branch. Kelvin returns reasonably dry for public consumption. Lucy, on the ground doubled over hugging her knees to her brow, is panting and gasping for next breath, yoga-like, now crushing a clump of spearmint with the curvature of her supple spine. Brent, still upside, is below the branches now holding the trunk like a big fat squirrel giggling with his checkered shirt hanging below his head.
"I s-surmise that we we have k-consummated quite s-sufficient," says Kelvin, "we o-ought to al-al-most cer-certainly ex-expend P-porky's proboscidiform r-receding to the unfathomable f-freezer s-sooner than he deaf-def-rosts in thi-this ambient high t-temperature. An insufficiency of d-deciduous over-bowered g-gloominess," dabbing at a dark detail that Kelvin had missed during his sabbatical near to the crotch of all crotches.
"You mean we gotta take Porky back?" says Lucy, "Porky looks pretty stiff to me. I bet he get three more hours at least."
Brent rolls himself off the pine trunk in a slow somersault that propels him like a wooden barrel tumbling past Goat Island towards a patch of broadleaf ferns, "We got to be careful now we don't be seen."
Next come up on them all a sudden and without appropriate warning a black car, a '66 Lotus Corina with windows all darkened an fire-engine red air scoop over the motor, a soused-up head of chrome. As the manic vehicle quickly and suddenly approaches, accelerates closer and closer to Porky they all three gongoozlers hear an exhaustive roaring that keeps expanding and gloating louder and louder, a rumbling deep and disturbing approaching. A dark and foreboding spectre approaches from the distant east. Brent resembles his family visiting Niagara Falls. Kelvin constipates the last days of Pompeii. Lucy dreams of the Barberzoni School of Modeling: Beauty, grace, and her golden future empowered for success -- just like she reads on the matchbooks cover. Fate awaits them with the power of quickened emotion.
The mysterious black machine, with the hyperbolic determination of an invisible manic speed freak, is shooting ahead straight lined faster, then faster yet. Even a bit more faster. Very fast. Fabulously fast. Quickly. Buzzing now like a hornet on bug spray. Then now our woodland friends can make out for a brief nano-second painted sidewinder flames in orange and red on the side panels. The front end of the little tin machizmo is humming, lunging forward, bouncing in syncopated rhythm on its good shocks, and eating whole chunks of West Creek Road in greedy gulps. Sunlight shimmers off the avaricious grill and dazzles Lucy, who ducks down to roll around in wild geranium, wartweed and rocket. Kelvin crouches down behind the chunk of sparkling gneiss that don't seem quite big enough any more. Brent looks around not knowing quite where to hide and pulls his shirt further up over his head figuring at least he won't be recognized by strangers.
"Damn, Brent, do we got be lookin' at that big old fat ass belly of yers?" chides Lucy. "We don't need exposing yerself. Is that tattoo around your navel what I think it is? How come I never seen that ugly before? You just git that done? Is that the "BIG surprise" you were telling me you got at the lawnmower show? I hope you didn't have to pay shit for beans. Is that the front end or back? Does it speak English? What you want -- go join a freak show?"
Time moves swiftly and not all the really important questions get answered in a reasonable order, always working crap for brains, and though time has slowed down right now about now to a very very slow and sticky treacle induced crawl for Lucy, Brent and Kelvin, giving them a modest pause to contemplate if it is a pig tattoo spread across Brent's stomach, or possibly the rear end of a hippopotamus, or some sort of winter squash to be felt up for prognostication, it is not like they are on a time machine with infinite regression or anything cool like that and despite each of them wanting to look away from, to deny and ignore the inevitable recognition of imploding events, the black car is charged up, the unknown driver has a full head of rhythm n' blues and his polt-foot leaned on the damnable accelerator. The monster keeps right on moving closer and closer and suddenly… suddenly the car swerves over to the side of the road directly bee line, straight as a stiff pecker in a cat house, right at Porky… right at Porky and makes one last great leap of effort, a little metal box, a mechanical panther, pouncing on an innocent prey, as with all of its might and octane fueled energy it rams forward. Whack! Boom!
Whacka whacka bonk Crunch Whizzzza Boomp pud Plud Smack Bong Zing… as the ominous motor car zoots past. Resounding tin can on a red painted stick you get at carnival spinning around above the head screeches out Whizz Whizz Whizz. Combination of exploding basketballs squanched by CAT D-9, or pebbles jostled in an empty extra-virgin olive-oil can, or Chino Moreno acoustic with a broken hurdy gurdy shoved up his bum. Noise.
"Damn, man! Did you see that?" squeaks Kelvin.
"I think it's a pig."
"No Lucy! Not Brent's gut. Did you see what that car did to P-p-porky?"
"I need help," grumbles a struggling Brent disconsolately, the shirt stucky gummed up to the side of his head with globules of tacky, stinky pine sap matting sideburns, his arms twisted abonkers up in air. A small area of cotton-polyester fabric, a gasketed diaphragm of colored threads moving rhythmically around the hole of his mouth, where his mouth we can suppose should be anatomically located if we could see it -- but for all the world right now this minute in time looking like a Scottish bog mummy yawning, when Brent breaths. In and out.
"Where did it go?" Lucy tugs on Brent's shirttail from behind, "Squat down, would ya? I want to SEE what Kelvin is yammerin' 'bout."
The bonnet of the juggernaut is flipped up arse about face as it shoots past running blindly full power-out a few hundred feet down the extended road. Despite the dark windows the driver cannot possibly see where he is going. Not even if he wore x-ray goggles. The car chugs down, then pulls a ninety degree skid from asphalt to gravel, jiggering the frame, moving along at a good clip, brakes and radial performance Dunlop tyres smoking, bumps over a small carpenter ant infested log past the shoulder, disintegration of decimated wood pulp, then drops down to halt frozen with front wheels nestled smoking in a patch of indian strawberries and the rear axle and bumper wedged and slowly sinking into the black-mud ditch. All but turned snapping turtle. Gurgle. A frog jumps. A pine cone falls. A crow caws. A moose mooses. Lucy sees Brent. No sign, not a single remnant, no trace whatsoever, absolutely nothing is seen by our now currently stunned yet anxious trio of the frozen porcupine that until a short brief instant, just a little itty bitty twinkle of an eye kind of brief and hardly noticeable minute ago, as if they were losing large chunks of seconds of eternity out of their consciousness, I mean, they could have been whisked right out of Speedsville and transported to Lag’ado to process gherkins, the whole time they think, and we can clearly see, without ever knowing it, that they are hunkering and bumping and burping around in the woody-meadow eco-environment along side West Creek Road, with the gurgle of the foamy shale-encased creek water running over flat rocks in the nearby background, and where Porky, until just now, I mean like, just now, was propped up out near the road before them. Gone it is.
"Where is Porky? Where is Porky?" screams Lucy as she rips at Brent's shirt with her gloved hands one last time before running towards the road. The butcher paper jiggles to the left, then it shifts to the right throwing her off balance, "Who the cripes thought up this damned bustier, Kelvin?" She gives a good shove to break free of the containment, "Ooops! Not that far!"
By this time the natty driver is out of the devil's torpedo, standing next to his door. He lifts his Brookes-Brothers polarized shades and looks to the discarded bonnet behind him back down the road a ways towards the recomposed Lucy coming up now screaming and waving one arm and holding to her left armpit firmly with the other. "Where is Porky?" she bellows then stops in the middle of the road to rudely once more adjust her temporary undergarment.
Closing slowly up behind her is a short-legged fellow with soiled trousers with oversize yellow goggles and jet-black hair frizzed out like an electrified puppet. The driver looks askance of Lucy approaching to the remnants of his bloody hood. He walks around the door and the bumper, jumps the flow of manky fluids, and glares silently under where the hood was until very recently very much secured. A bit batty and disoriented as should be rightfully expected, considering.
"Where is Porky?" shrieks Lucy as she comes up quick on him.
The driver squints at Lucy, "Me naff knackers are buggered, lil' Yank mum."
"What?"
Brent is fretted they are all going to get in a whole mess of terrible trouble so he holds back at first behind a basswood stump. Seeing Lucy out confronting the driver of the car he gets worried even more than the potential of explaining this trouble to his old man that he might be needed to defend his rucking girlfriend. Never know what kind of trouble Lucy get into. She don't take to crap too easy with anybody when she has a mind. Brent sees her jumpin' around and he trundles up quicker than a two legged skunk.
So as the driver looks up past the agitated young lady with the big leather gloves and the approaching Kelvin with yellow goggles he sees this gigantic Allegheny Yeti of a red headed guy in stupendous sneakers emerge from the hedgerow with a red-and-black checkered shirt wrapped around his neck. He can just make out a tattoo of some sort of den of vipers, best he can tell at the distance without his prescription aviators, on the big guy's belly. "Is this a bloody Amrican funfare roundabout?" he says, "Where's the loo, Moggie? I need squits a dump."
"Hell it ain't no circus, you hump!" a rare spurt of clarity for Lucy.
Looking back towards the discombobulated vehicle the driver observes, "The flippin' red winker seems a bit stuck."
"Is that Porky?" fingers Lucy menacingly towards the front seat of the car as her mouth puckers to suppress a wheeze.
"Come on Luv, drop your rompers and give us a bandy peek o' them bubbies."
Lucy, quite insensible of the innuendo and import of the driver dude's proferance, bends over, grabs her fanny and begins a pollinivorous sneezing, "Oh, Porky! Oh, Porky!"
"Fabulous! Fabulous! Fanny that! And what you little man, you be the wanker dwarf?" towering over the now fully approached and present diminished Kelvin.
"I doe, I doe… "
"Did you wee your pants?"
"You… you imbecilic moron!"
"Wankstain?"
"K-kelvin. Kelvin Fahren. W-we are p-protestants. And and you?
"Banger, Todger Banger. Atheist barfucker, at your service."
"Howdy," says Brent coming up on the crowd all friendly and neighborly like holding out his pitch globed hand, fingers all stuck together -- a welcoming duck web held out to shake.
Todger situates and stares at Brent, looks down at his own clean gloved hand harboring shades, coldly disober with no hint of a tingle or twitch. Used to thwarting inebriated elfin menaces in bakery alleys. Cool hand Todger. Looks again at Brent without visible motion of the aqueous mentation.
"Peardon me?"
"Do… you… spea… k… Am…er…i…can," sniffing a hint of what he don't know for sure but is a damply lung expelled gas of vodka, tomato, pepper, lime and celery -- slowly enunciates Brent with grand facial and graceful one-arm gestures, the more easily to be misunderstood, minus flapping appendages of cloth, and a suspicion that his offer of courtly Speedsville welcome is not being clearly stood, or that the audience is densely exotic, while he wrestles with adjusting his over garment and flaps his cap idly stuck now at the tips of the fingers of his unextended arm. An appendage resembling elephantine gills.
"What sorta rat arsed shirt lifter are you?"
"Looks like that there porcupine did a bit of damage, don't it?"
"That's a load of shank! Gobsmacked ballsed-up biftah yam yam pig-ignorant hard-shit you duff swamp donkee!"
"Don't say I know," Brent taking the gobbledygook exclamations of the stranger in a flaccid gait.
The lump of frozen flesh and quills flung through the grill mesh into the radiator. "Not much of a radiator." Wrapped around the front of the engine with disconnected hoses hissing, steam sputtering -- water over boiling in a dense white haze up off the engine block. Susurrus, a distinct smell of boiled rubber-crayfish, snails, lube grease mixed of thickly blackened engine oil.
"Pretty flimsy if you askt me." The porcupine hardness shoved up over the engine and cleanly snapped off the air cleaner, not so cleanly detached carburetor. Smell of gas mixed with hot water. "I know, you ain't asking me." Brent pokes around a bit more, "Looks me like you got no distributor, Gus. Oh, no, there it is. Be one of 'em foren rigs?"
Popped the hood clear over the car. Blew out tinted windscreen. "Hey Lucy, step back a bit over," Brent motions to the side away, pointing Lucy back towards the Falcon. To the back road. You can just make out through the copse as a breeze blows through the canopy of summer yellowed leaves, the Falcon. "I say, step back."
There be a large bend in the top of the car where the prickery cannonball ricocheted off the interior ceiling before bouncing off the flesh polished leather passenger seat, a random few dislodged quills now dangling idly in the interior half-light of the car. No specific diagnosis derived from their erratic pattern of puncture, no message from the anemone waving. "This sure looks like one hell of a mess you got yourself, Gus. You got triple-A?" Porky in ballistics mode nearly slammed into the gearstick where the driver's left gloved-hand was firmly attached, rudely knocked open the passenger door, with eighty-five percent of the animal carcass ended up stuck to the wood instrument panel partway behind the steering wheel and the now-static emitting radio.
Kelvin at the passenger side window dousing into the depths of the car with a bent witch hazel stick, "Man, that is one torment of a proficient freezer; this mother sucker is nonetheless iced up inflexible as mollified granite." A shot blast pattern of quills radiating out from the center of final impact, a rose onion but with a slow drip, drip, drip as the rodent flesh warms to bloodmelt. "It is obtainable to necessitate superfluous exertion to scour up this capacious untidiness," quotes Kelvin with a cheerful and uplifting snicker to the engineer.
"Well, you know, truth is I hate bloody porcupines, me little chap. I run over the creatures ever break nows I'm oer hea," says the sportster with a wavering stance of pride and hit-and-miss accomplishment.
"What you call this stink?" barks an irritated Kelvin right back straight in face. "Who the hell gave you the right to come to America and run over our wild animals? Porky was doing you not any interference and this… this is what you do? Run over an innocent wild animal with your car? Jesus! What kind of sick bastard are you?"
Perplexed, "I had a bad run with the effin spiny bastards when I was a wee runt."
"Lousy excuse. We should make you skin and eat it."
"Fell in a open sewer 'hind our house one night and could'na climb it out."
"Sob story, you ass"
By this time, ignoring Kelvin and Todger, Brent is tugging Lucy behind him away through the cloak of shrub and elderberry towards the Falcon.
"Listen, Gods' truth, an there was these hedgehogs swimmin' aroun' and aroun' me all the night. Dark like coal that night, no moon. Not one minds you, ones enough to go to hell, but I got no luck then and fells in ther shithole with three."
"Fiction!"
"Not one."
Kelvin in agitation throws his arms up, then down, spins around, stomps his feet. "Bogus eructation!" he belches.
The driver stands blinking at him, but goes on rambling with his zoological autobiography.
"Three hedgehogs paddling aroun' in a stink to keep our noses up."
Brent jumps in the Falcon. Lucy climbs in on her side. They start up the car and drive around beside the slumped Lotus.
"Squeakin' an me yellin' to get out."
Kelvin catches that Brent and Lucy are moving out.
"Me mum passt in the back parlor she not come alon 'til mornin' pulls me up."
"Reckless endangerment. Damn, man, who the hell you expect to clean this up? Forget about it," waving off the proffered license.
"Pissed she was I got hosed."
Kelvin runs over and jumps in the back of the Falcon. As the threesome speeds away he shouts out the rear window, "You can get thrown in jail for smashing porcupines, you know."
XXX
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