Chapter 22
Grant: The Ragtags
If anyone saw us coming - well, anyone who wasn’t witness to the events of the Greener Valley Winter Festival – they would think they were looking at a movie shoot. Or maybe they took the brown acid. Because this couldn’t be real. No way.
There’s a teenage girl. There’s an old woman trailed by a yapping dog. There’s a fat, sweaty man in half a Santa suit, his white floppy belly bouncing up and down as he attempts to keep up with us. And there’s me, leading the pack with nothing but an airplane size bottle of vodka stuffed into my pocket. We have no weapons for this fight except ourselves. I don’t think this kind of fight requires a physical weapon, anyhow. This is going to be a fight of spirit.
We’re walking through Greener Valley looking for all the world like the rag tag band of misfits I knew we would become. We’re stepping over car parts and pieces of sidewalk and sidestepping children who have gone from rabid to confused. They’re still a little demonic looking, but seem to be coming out of whatever stupor made them want to kill their neighbors. Hopefully they won’t remember a thing. Can you imagine the therapy bills for a kid who sucked the soul out of his neighbor? Or the kid who witnessed a drunk Santa Claus dropping his drawers to piss against an abandoned police car? Because that’s what Stu is doing now, in full view of about seven kids. In Stu’s defense, they don’t seem to be paying much attention to him. They look like kids who are coming down off an almost lethal dose of cupcakes. Wild eyed, dazed and probably ready to drop into a ten-hour sugar crash coma. I don’t want to leave them out here because I really don’t know what’s going to happen when we get to the town center. Whatever forces of evil are hanging out there might decide to spread out to the rest of the town and I don’t want them finding these kids and inhabiting them again.
“Let’s get the kids in one of these houses.” Mrs. Beasley, reading my mind again.
Terri and I corral the kids like cows and usher them into the first house with an open door, which happens to be the home of Curtis Freeman. Terri and Beasley are getting the kids settled in the living room and Stu is yelling something from another room. I think he’s saying…
“Holy fuck. This just ain’t right.”
Yes, that’s what I thought he was saying.
I walk into a spare room and “holy fuck” is my first thought as well. “This just ain’t right” is an understatement, though.
The walls are lined with pictures. Thousands of them. Most of the pictures are computer printed photos of Shana Cummings f/k/a Sharon Weiss in various stages of undress and various acts of depravity with inanimate objects. Oh, wait. There’s some animate objects, too. Mostly men, but there are farm animals in a couple. Interspersed in the pictures of Curtis Freeman’s ex fiancé are pictures of Stu McLundy. You know, the guy standing right in front of me. In the Santa suit. There’s about two thousand pictures of all sizes of Sharon and near a hundred of Stu, spaced out evenly among the Sharon porn. There are a few normal pictures of Sharon strewn about. High school yearbook photo. A party at the beach. Dancing with Curtis. Blowing a kiss. Those photos are easy to spot not because of their normalcy, but for the big red X drawn over them. One of Stu’s pictures is next to each of the normal Sharon photos.
Then there’s the shelves. The far wall has ten wooden shelves and they’re filled with cassette tapes. Each tape is labeled with a date and the caption “Scratch and Skip with Stu McLundy.” The weirdo taped every single Saturday show.
Stu is shifting uncomfortably between the desire to ogle Sharon’s pictures and the desire to rip his own photos from the wall. “I don’t know, man. I don’t know. It’s nice to have fans, but when it’s laid out like this it seems damn creepy to me.”
“Yea, me too, Stu.” Then again, everything that has happened this day has been tinged with creepiness. I have a feeling it’s not going to get any less creepy as the day goes on.
As if on cue, Terri says from the living room, “Stu? Grant? Umm…Curtis is home. And he…oh God..he…” her voice trails off, punctuated by a thud. I think she might have fainted.