LIFE IS THE SHIT IN PEE PEE TOWNSHIP, OHIO. I nudged one nostril shut with my knuckle and snorted a fourteen-inch festoon of fire ants melting into a pineapple popsicle. Soaked colonies somersaulting—catapulting into a labyrinthine vine of poison ivy with withered leaves and white peach-fuzzed berries spiraling up splintered wood—camouflaging the rickety barn. Barney bet me eighty bucks I wouldn’t have the balls. I watched a wreath of fire ants glowing in my belly.
“¡Feliz Navidad!” Barney said.
Druggies at P.P. High called him Eight-ball Barney. So did the dudes at Pee Pee Lanes: fiends with alley cat eyeballs, turkey haulers with Keystone guts jiggling over the bubblegum-coagulated counter where Grandpa doled out fetid bowling shoes. Grandpa lived on whisky, funeral potatoes, Chiquita bananas, muskies, sawdust, and chunks of Vicodin. He swigged from a two-liter Sprite bottle marinated by a rattlesnake shedding its skin into tequila.
“Open the door,” Barney said.
“It burns my face,” I said.
“It’s okay,” Barney said.
Barney shattered a Noche Buena bottle across a caterpillar with cloudy vision and licked the stone, poison ivy and all.
“Yippee ki-yay,” he said.
He spit into his armpit and cracked the cap with amber incisors. Curly black hairs hung from wet lips. Barney unzipped his cargo shorts and yanked out his foot-long penis.
“The pump is working,” he said.
I turned away, grunting.
“Look at all these veins,” he said.
Barney’s voice changed when he exposed himself.
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
“I like dead bodies,” he said.
Barney sniffled and you could hear the acoustics of frayed nostrils—cartilage chiseled from years of cocaine and meth and pills, the chill of broken bones, the rich temporary thrill of marrow donated weekly. Barney pumped iron at P. P. High.
“I got busy in a Burger King bathroom,” Barney said.
Barney pissed toward the wreath of poison ivy. Urine didn’t bother me much. The wind was blowing in the opposite direction.
“Mr. Wilson is humongous, huh?” Barney asked.
I counted the veins larger than #2 pencils, a maze more ominous than the one carved into Old Man Temple’s cornfield on the outskirts of Pee Pee Township.
“Two tweens lost in the labyrinth last night,” Barney said.
“It’s larger than yesterday,” I said. “You’ll be ready for the New Year’s party.”
“Better be,” Barney said.
“Did they eat corn husks?” I asked.
“They ate DMT and shrooms.”
“Damn,” I said.
“They froze to death. Deputy Dave said they’re still stuck together in the morgue.”
“Let me go,” I said.
Barney released me. Cumulonimbus sinking into dying moons, the ants glowing inside me—brighter—inching closer to my rectum.
“You’re really gonna do it?” I asked.
He stuck his penis into a wreath of fire ants crowning a nucleus of poison ivy.
“Hell yeah, Sis,” Barney said.
Barney boasted about breaking into the ancient graveyard when all the neighbors were at the party getting wasted to commemorate another year. It was the only night Deputy Dave’s son wasn’t guarding the graves. Some of the settlers robbed stagecoaches and Chippewa Indians. They were buried with rags, riches, headdresses, pockets weighted with silent promises.
“Corpses are my kryptonite,” Barney said.
“Superman underpants are hard to find,” I said.
They were buried with rags, riches, headdresses, pockets weighted with silent promises.
***
Grandpa never missed his shift at Pee Pee Lanes—even when he was vomiting blood. Grandma texted to tell me he was missing. She hadn’t seen him since he went to bed. Barney was great at rolling primos: Siamese joints of Alaskan Thunderfuck sprinkled with cocaine from Jalisco.
“When I woke he was gone,” Grandma said. “The house reeked of stale dog farts. Diego Maradona was licking his scrotum when I walked into the kitchen. His truck was here.”
We searched the house. It was a diminutive dilapidated single-story home where some of the first settlers’ surviving grandchildren congregated to get drunk in the 1840s. All the addicts lived. Most the teetotalers died during harsh winters and dank disease-cloaked summers. Hundreds of men pissed themselves in the winter of 1872. Some things never change.
***
Barney is my Siamese brother. We were born conjoined at the nose. We inhale what the other is doing miles away. I lost my virginity in Pee Pee Creek to a boy whose face looked like a prized Muskellunge: wide-mouthed, jagged-toothed, jaundiced, bloated—deprived of oxygen, atavistic, ferocious. Barney could smell me from our house.
“Come on,” said Barney.
His face mauve, Barney yanked his zipper. He moved sluggishly, a dreary dinosaur, fossilized fragments of cirrhosis, footsteps fading into fire ants—rancid. We guzzled the last six Noche Buenas. Barney smashed some cancer pills and we snorted them on the rock. The poison ivy would keep away Uncle Rick at Christmas after turkey dinner. Rick was a seven-foot-tall amateur sumo wrestler and aspiring porn star. He was three years older than me and Barney but he lassoed us to his canopy bed four times already: Easter, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Yom Kippur. Rick had eight arms, octopus eyeballs, three giant legs—a scabbed pimpled penis larger than Barney’s—swooping back and forth to the moan of the wood frame, bandanas in split mouths, bleeding down his shaft.
“Let’s go find Grandpa,” Barney said.
***
We walked without words, woken by the sound of Pee Pee crackling in the static cold breeze, smoking exhaust pipes, aluminum and metals in our blood, rusty water in the fountains of Pee Pee Park and Edison Elementary.
“So horny,” Barney said as we trudged past the ancient graveyard.
Kenny Dickens waved when he saw us. Kenny loomed, elfish, smoking a Camel Wide on a tombstone. Kenny was a weird kid who would never enter a courtroom. A juvenile delinquent, Kenny rose to local fame as a fraternity brother at Ohio State. He got expelled his senior year for hazing. Two black dudes died, but Kenny was never charged with any crime. Four brothers are rotting in Allan-Oakwood Correctional Institution.
“I’m gonna dig the dirt faster than shit,” Barney said.
“Call The Guinness Book,” I said.
Grandma was the bomb. She blasted Cam’ron and puffed purple haze. She had fake boobs but a beautiful face—no wrinkles. No hint of Grandpa urinating on her forehead in the mildew bathtub. A matriarch of Pee Pee Township, Grandma snorted the medicine cabinet round-the-clock and this instilled courage.
“Hey, Grandma,” Barney said.
She kissed our cheeks.
“Kids!”
I woke embedded in Grandma’s mattress.
“Grandpa wasn’t in the barn,” Barney said.
Truth was we never made it inside. Barney exposed his horse dong and then we sort of got drunk and forgot.
“Have you kids been huffing?” Grandma asked.
I shrugged as Barney nodded. There was no hiding anything from Grandma.
“Again?” Grandma asked.
“Yup,” Barney said.
Grandma called an Uber.
“We need to check the barn,” Grandma said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Detective Dave picked up a signal from his cell phone,” Grandma said. “A Titleist.”
“A ping?” I asked.
“Yeah, Detective Dave called before you came,” Grandma said.
“Deputy Dave,” I said.
Grandma nodded.
“He called,” she said.
We hustled to the curb to smoke a Camel Wide. Grandma asked for a drag. The Uber driver honked. It was Uncle Max, a convivial drunk.
“Just tryin’ to make an extra buck,” Uncle Max said.
We shuffled into his Taurus. It was clean and legal and he got it when the cops bashed his head into the pavement one eerie night in Michigan by an insignificant Great Lake.
“Aren’t we all,” Grandma said. “To the barn—step on it!”
Uncle Max hit the accelerator and the engine purred. Max was no pussy. Nobody can say the Peacocks are cowards. We’re convicts; fishermen; corpse fuckers; penis pump purchasers; prostitutes; farmers; thieves; drug dealers; addicts; fiends; wrestlers; school shooters; Burger King drive-thru employees.
“Faster,” Grandma said.
The roads wept empty. Everybody was home doing drugs or playing Bingo at Pee Pee Church of Christ. When we arrived, Deputy Dave was dead, bleeding into the wreath of poison ivy. Fire ants blanketed him—caked in mucus, blood, urine, castles of coagulated semen.
“He killed him,” Grandma said.
We ushered her into the barn. The heavy door heaved. Horses neighed. We trudged through Augean squalor and climbed the frail wooden stairs to the cattycornered loft. We listened to Grandpa singing. Uncle Sal and Kenny Dickens whimpered, hogtied to the trough filled with fire ants. Uncle Sal and Kenny ambled, petrified eyes fatter than flying saucers, duct-taped mouths mumbling drunkenly.
“Welcome,” said Grandpa.
Grandpa’s voice hoarse, he stood, butt-naked, sweating into a mule. The loft was blooming with settlers, dolls stuffed with sawdust. The walls ballooning, ceiling crumbling, rotting rafters trembling.
“Why is handsome Detective Dave dead?” Grandma asked.
“Deputy Dave,” I said.
Grandma nodded.
“How ya haul the trough up these stairs?” Barney asked.
Grandpa didn’t say anything. Flies swarmed, bathing in our eyeballs, nostrils, ears. The dolls started moving, crying, driven by fire ants and cicadas.
“These are amazing,” Grandma said, admiring the eyes of a young girl.
“Just like the settlers,” I said.
“Where did you find these old clothes?” asked Grandma.
“I embalmed them with salt and baking soda,” Grandpa said.
He smiled wider than the world, brighter than a billion bulbs.
Barney undressed them and entered earths from centuries dead, peeling headdresses from flayed faces, making love with wild abandon as Grandpa hovered above. The barn moaning, we watched Barney and Grandpa taking turns. I listened to reindeers and sleigh bells, toboggans dancing in my mind—the barn shaking and moaning—the little boys and girls so alive—so free.
“Merry Christmas,” Grandpa said.
Tribal reveries flowed through hardened arteries. Fire ants rolled into a colony of shrapnel—rising and falling, tiny eyeballs of toddlers calling me—forward, backwards—into the youthful bowels of a farmhouse filled with flames—elegant and tatterdemalion dolls wrapping rotting arms around me.
I see an ocean of eternity unfurling every morning, muckies churning in burning gut, Grandma getting down to business—cutting greedily with grimy fingernails through tattered clothes and ancient orifices—watching us out the corner of bloodshot sclarea. The matriarch of Pee Pee Township, wreathed in glory, grimacing with sawdust on rotting amber incisors.
Matthew Dexter lives in Cabo San Lucas. His fiction has been published in hundreds of literary journals and dozens of anthologies. He is the author of The Ritalin Orgy (Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing). His second novel, Hero Custodian, will be published in 2019.
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