Chapter 31
Grant: It's a Gas
Terri gets into the gas station before me and when I hear her say “Jesus Christ I wish I had a fucking Xanax” my first thought is she’s got a really filthy mouth for such a young girl and as soon as I walk into the gas station and see what she’s seeing that thought is overtaken by JESUS CHRIST I WISH I HAD A FUCKING XANAX.
Ok. I’ve seen a lot of things today. A lot of bizarre, weird, otherworldly, unexplainable things. I’ve seen houses implode and cars hover in the air. I’ve seen feral children kill my neighbors and shadows that exist on their own. I saw the mutilated corpse of a woman I grew up with. But nothing nothing nothing has prepared me for the sight of Stu McLundy, folk hero of Greener Valley, sprawled dead in a pile of snack cakes, an ill-fitting Santa Claus suit exposing his white whale belly. I memorize this moment, every single bit of it, every squished HoHo and popped button because god knows if we ever make it out of this day I am going make a million fucking dollars painting this scene right here.
I’m a terrible person, I know this.
Terri swoons next to me, looking very much like she’s about to faint and leave me standing here as the second to last conscious person in our formerly merry gang of four. So I do the only thing I think you are supposed to do in this situation. I raise my hand, bring it down on her face and yell “SNAP OUT OF IT, TERRI.”
She snaps out of it.
“You’ve been wanting to do that all day, haven’t you?” She holds her hand up to her cheek. “That’s going to leave a mark.”
“Well, I snapped you out of it didn’t, I? You were about to faint.”
She rolls her eyes. “Stu,” she says, turning her attention back to the million dollar painting-to-be on the floor. “Holy fuck, Stu is dead.” I raise my hand slightly in case she gets the fainting idea again. But she doesn’t.
“Grant, what are we going to do? We were going to use Stu to get us out of this mess.”
Looks like I’m not the only terrible person thinking only of our survival while the legendary Stu McLundy lies dead in front of us.
Then a low moan escapes the corpse of Stu. My first instinct is to run but my brain’s instinct isn’t telling my legs what to do and I just stand there, frozen. Terri puts her head down on Stu’s exposed chest.
“What are you doing? He might be a zombie! Get away….”
“No,” says Mrs. Beasley. She’s kneeling next to Terri and has her hand on Stu’s belly flab. “No. He’s Stu. Just Stu.”
I trust her because I have to.
“What in the goddamn hell happened to me?” Stu bolts upright then plops right down again. A Snoball flattens underneath his head. He’s alive. Still…human.
“Do you know your name?” I ask him, like I’m just checking to make sure he has all his bearings.
“I’m Stu McLundy for Christ’s sake. Of course I know my name.”
He doesn’t sound evil. His voice sounds like his own. I think we are ok. He stands up, brushes himself off. “I feel like hell.”
“You look like you came straight from there,” Terri says.
“Gee. Thanks. You ain’t looking so hot yourself, little girl.”
Terri starts to take offense but quickly changes the subject.
“Ok, so you’re not dead. I guess you just passed out.”
“It kind of felt like a heart attack. Or…” Stu stops, looks like he’s remembered something, then closes his mouth mid-sentence.
“What, Stu? What were you going to say?” I’m about to not trust him again.
“What I’m about to say may sound crazy, so just listen with an open mind, ok?”
I look at Mrs. B. and Terri. We all nod in Stu’s direction.
“I’m…well…I’m. Oh, fuck it. I’m meant to keep Greener Valley safe. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’ve been here. I can’t explain where I came from or why I was chosen to come here and keep you assholes safe from yourselves, but it’s true.” He stops, looks at us. He’s waiting for us to say something. Call him crazy. Liar. Drunk.
Terri and I exchange a glance. I look back at Stu.
“No shit, McLundy.”
“Huh?” Not what he was expecting to hear from me.
“Encyclopedia Brown over here and I figured it out right before you went belly up in the HoHos.”
“You’re an angel,” Terri offers.
“Well, not an angel. An…agent, I guess.”
“An agent that uses music to protect.”
“I guess. Sounds kind of ridiculous when you say it like that.”
“It is sort of ridiculous.”
“Yea.”
Stu leans his back against the wall and slides down to the floor like a fat, white slug. He leaves a trail of pink frosting and coconut on the wall. He tries to remove some of the pastry from his hair, gives up and opens a Hershey bar. After two or three bites he starts talking.
“I’m going to make this quick because we have to get over to the festival site right now and because I really fucking hate that part of the movie where someone explains everything that is happening.”
We all nod in agreement.
“Ok. Reader’s digest version. A few hundred years ago I killed a noble man. The man was meant to be a hero. He was supposed to save a town whose people were leading dark lives, hell bent on destroying each other. I don’t know who appoints the heroes and such. I never got that far up the chain. So don’t ask me about that. But one day I got drunk and went out looking for a fight. I was one of those hell bent townspeople. I was helping to poison the place with my fighting and drinking. I saw this guy in the town square. He was playing a violin. All these people were gathering around him. They were all oohing and aahing over him and they all had these dumb smiles on their faces like they were…happy. No one in that goddamn town was going to be happy if I wasn’t. So I ripped the violin out of his hands and I beat him with it. When the violin was in pieces, I beat him with my fists. And then he was dead. The people in the town – my neighbors, my family, everyone – started in on me. Pummeling me. Beating the ever loving shit out of me. My god that hurt. They just went berserk, like every ounce of anger they’d been storing up for the ultimate destruction of the town was taken out on me. I died right there in the town square. I think I bled to death. I don’t know.”
He takes a few more bites of the Hershey bar. We wait in silence.
“Except I didn’t really die. I just went somewhere else. I mean, my body was still in the town square but I was in this big room with a lot of important looking people in it. And then they told me. I killed this important guy. I ruined what they were trying to do. I unleashed the fury. All of that stuff. So I had to pay. Instead of getting to rest in peace, I had to do what that guy was supposed to do. Over and over again. In lots of towns and lots of places. And eventually I ended up in Greener Valley, saving you little shits from destruction. Until today. Until they fucking fired me and took the music away. I mean, you guys really figured a lot of this out early. I’m pretty impressed. Without the music, all the anger comes up. All the frustration. All the lies and stealing and just general badness. They live for that. They live because of that. And they’re just minions. There are leaders among them, men and women who appear as people, not shadows, people who make these towns just to use them to grow the anger that they need to keep living. And that’s all I’m going to tell you now because it’s getting to be too late to save this place.”
We leave it at that. None of us are dumbfounded or anything. After all we’ve seen and heard today, there’s not a damn thing that wouldn’t sound reasonable. Even stand alone shadows and a guy who has been alive for hundreds of years. We just accept it the way we accepted everything else today.
“I need clothes.” Stu stands up, takes off the Santa jacket and honestly, he’s kind of revolting. The flab. The whiteness. I feel fit standing next to him. “I can’t go out there and fix things dressed like this. If it all goes to hell and I get sent back, I don’t want to have to go up to the office in a bloody Santa suit.”
Terri points out the lockers at the far end of the gas station. There’s only one without a lock. She opens it and reveals an XXL mechanic’s jumpsuit. It’s navy blue with gold embroidering on the right shoulder that says “Jerry’s Gas n Snack.” Over the pocket on the right breast is stitched the name Stu.
“What the hell…” Terri holds up the jumpsuit, pointing at the name. We’ve all finally found something to be dumbfounded about. A jumpsuit. “I mean, what are the chances…”
“They were good,” Stu says as he strips out of the rest of the Santa suit. “I believe someone left this for me.” Stu reminds himself to tip the driver next time he’s back in the chariot. He snaps up the jumpsuit. It fits perfectly. As does the pair of Nikes that are in the locker.
“Well, I guess that means we should go do this, then.” Mrs. Beasley looks eager to get her war on.
“Wait.” Stu reaches back into the locker and pulls out a Dixie riddle cup. He holds it gingerly. I expect it to be filled with Jack Daniels and I wait for him to shoot it back. Instead, he holds out the cup. He motions for us to come look.
Snow. There’s snow in the cup. Maybe on another day I might have said it was shaved ice, the kind you get out of a Snoopy Sno-cone machine, but not today. Today I know that’s snow. I’m not sure what Stu is supposed to do with it but I have a pretty good idea that it’s important to the plot of this soon to be a major motion picture.
“Let’s make it snow,” he says.
And we head off to the Greener Valley Winter Festival.