The Lankville Daily News

By Ric Royer

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Once, I got a job as a tire salesman.  I decided on an aggressive approach.

A man walked in.

“Hey, asshole.  You want to buy these tires?” I yelled.

He looked shocked, amazed.

“I…I’m just looking.”

“There ain’t no looking at these motherfuckers, chump,” I yelled, patting a nearby set of white walls.  “You either buy or you are no use to me.  Tire Garden can get along fine without your bullshit money.”

He asked to speak to the manager.

I approached the door of Gary’s office.  Gary was in there playing solitaire on a laptop.

“There’s a rapist out here, wants to talk to you,” I yelled loudly.

Gary said nothing.  Just looked at me with those weary red eyes.

They let me go that afternoon.

By Ric Royer

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You had to drive about seventy miles until you found a town with a reasonable selection of titty bars, Dwight opined. There’s always Lawrence but I find that to be bush league, he said, without irony. Never was Dwight so eloquent as when he talked of titty bars.

We stole a comfortable car, a ’78 Dodge if I remember and Dwight drove, making the town in about 40 minutes. It was a series of one-story brick structures, all painted black with opaque windows in their doors and garish color posters at street front. There was a hawker too, who idled on the concrete steps until he found a prospective customer.

Dwight parked on a dark side street. He had reasons for this, he said. I found the comment mysterious at the time. Later, I would come to the conclusion that that was the moment when Dwight began planning his own suicide.

We walked to the half-deserted main street. You could hear saxophone music from somewhere. We had a choice of four clubs– there was Skippers Go-Go, The Urban Tiger, Kitty Korner and Gelsinger’s French Toast.  Dwight leered at them, hands in his pockets, his hunter’s jacket covered with the stains of many a spreadable cheese luncheon. “One’s as good as any,” he said. Skippers Go-Go was first along the line.

The club was painted baby blue with a pole and a four-piece band off to one side. Dwight selected a table near the back and I followed.

Almost instantly a man with an enormous face and a ragged mane of hair grabbed Dwight by the shoulder. “My friend over there doesn’t like you. And I don’t like you neither.” I knew then there would be trouble and I bolted for the bathroom. I hid behind a locked stall door for what seemed like hours.

When I went back to the main room, the place had been partially burned to the ground. Only the simplest of architectural rudiments had been left. The floor had been cleared and a series of slop buckets had been placed to collect the blood. It was horrible.

I stumbled out onto an empty street. The rest of the clubs seemed still operating but there was nary a soul about. I tried desperately to find the old Dodge– I was convinced of the street but the car was gone. An old lady on a dilapidated shack porch, quite near where I felt the car to have been, smiled at me. Then she said, “Take a bus home. There ain’t no other way.”

I made the Greyhound station in just under an hour, despite having no sense of direction. It was painted the same baby blue as the club. I bought a ticket for Lawrence and the bus was near empty at that hour– there was a guy in the back wearing a t-shirt that read, I don’t need an encyclopedia, my wife knows everything. There was a browning Sunday paper all over the floor.

I never saw Dwight again.

By Ric Royer

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For hours, Dwight would sit in his lawn chair beneath the bug-zapper utterly motionless, not even shifting his heavy frame once, staring languidly towards the eerie savannah. Then, he would turn towards me abruptly and say something like:

“Let’s go down and beat up that fellow that built that little piano.”

I’d agree and the next thing I know, we’d be heading down there in Dwight’s old pickup. The front was now benchless and it was necessary to squat awkwardly or attempt to position oneself on the squalid collection of fetid blankets that lined the floor but that became moist from ceiling leaks. The pickup was lampless now too and Dwight would often have to veer off the road to avoid an aggregation of tumbleweeds or a dead body.

We finally arrived at the derelict bungalow. It sat off on its own behind a series of low, dead hedges. The front picture window was boarded up with cardboard boxes– you could still read the advertising on their sides. Condor Alights Beer, Buntz Mallows, Magnanimous Boys’ Horn of Comfy Hotel Bedding, standard really. Dwight parked the pickup across the dirt road.

The eccentric was there, we knew it. It was said he had constructed a tiny piano that could read your mind, pick up any melody there, play it back to you. The story was all over the county. But no one had ever seen it. Dwight decided to remedy that.

He kicked in the door with one simple forward exertion. The front room was lit somberly and the eccentric sat crouched at a desk, writing. Papers and books littered the surface. He didn’t look up.

The piano was there on a little shelf. Dwight stared at it. Suddenly, it lurched into action and began playing the “Barberie Pound Soaps” jingle. Dwight let out an abbreviated laugh of self-satisfaction. “Guess it works, huh.”

“Of course it works,” said the eccentric, still not turned in his chair. “Now, I must ask you to leave.”

Dwight had violence in his veins that night, I could tell. But he also felt a measure of respect for the little piano that could play the Barberie Pound Soaps song and its inventor. He wordlessly beckoned me out and even replaced the door using only some old wood screws in his pocket and a dime as a screwdriver.

Then we drove out to a trailer park and beat up some Island People.

By Ric Royer

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By Ric Royer

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We hired a girl to man the candy counter.  She had come down out of the hills a few days ago.

At the end of the first week, I asked her if she was enjoying the job.  She said that yes she was, that she enjoyed helping people pick out which candies were best suited for their own personal needs.  She did have one complaint though.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Well, Mr. Octotris, it’s this stool.”

“It’s Mr. Royer,” I corrected.  My bowels released a little.

“Mr. Roysticks, look at this stool.”

I looked at the stool.  I was lost for a moment.  I looked past her, out the picture window and saw some bushes suddenly disappear.

“Mr. Roypacks, the stool has no cushion left.  See?”

She showed me how the upholstery had been torn down to the plywood base.

“By the end of the day, Mr. Octotris, my…well…my backside (she said the word with extreme embarrassment) is red and sore, chafed even.  I’m wondering if we could get another stool.”

It was impossible.  I knew it.  But I was slowly falling in love with the girl and I knew I had to do something.  I muttered some platitude and got the hell out of there.

That night, in my apartment that had become a dark, dangerous trash-maze of my own creation, I found a seat cushion.  It had been a promotion item I had received at a baseball game and had the team name– “The Balloons” written in script across its front.  It was designed, I supposed, to help fans deal with the hard, unforgiving steel benches that passed for seating at the stadium.  I squeezed it into my knapsack and fell asleep right away in an old child’s swimming pool.

The next morning I got to the soda fountain early.  She had not arrived yet.  I tried the seat cushion on the candy counter stool.  It did not fit well but I did not want to believe it.  I wanted to believe that it hugged the stool, providing a pillowy barrier that would last forever.  Outside, I saw that the building across the street had been demolished at some point during the night.  A cordon had been fashioned to a tree and a mailbox.  I threw up a little.

I wanted her to understand that I could take the Balloons seat cushion away and that, without me, she would have no comfort.

Things moved very slowly that day.  An enormous shipment of tri-colored gums had arrived and it took hours to remove them from their cardboard boxes.  Mr. Jipps, the owner, had assigned his son Duke candy counter duties for a few hours.  I was standing right there when Duke first noticed the cushion.  He fingered its edges and almost picked it up.  But then his father barked at him and he forgot all about it.

It was after lunch when she took her place behind the counter.  The after-lunch candy crowd can be brisk and for nearly two hours she did nothing but push gummy drops into special paper sheaths, engage in restrained pleasantries, explain chocolate to nougat ratios.  I was starting to feel moist with rage.

Finally, at three, there was a lull.  She sat down and I could see the look of surprise on her face.  Then she slipped off the chair and fell forward into the display case.  I heard the sound of shattering glass, the screams of the idle women at the fountain.  Mr. Jipps shouted CALL A FIREMAN!  In the chaos that followed, I was able to slip out the back.  A billboard that had once framed the parking lot on the east side had disappeared.  I ran blindly through the alley.

I went into a fever dream.  I could see, in extreme close-up, the Balloons cushion fitting snugly across the top of the stool and people standing around commenting on it.  “Look at that fit,” they said.  I awoke at one point and was mindlessly gobbling the cans of a fat hooker in a fleabag hotel room.  She had the Balloons cushion on her head, was wearing it as a wig.  It looked beautiful.  She said, “My ex-husband followed the Balloons.  Do you remember that big brown Islander they had?  Herrera?”  I stared at her.  Then I blacked out again.

Next morning, I ended up in front of the soda fountain.  It was closed now.  They had put up a sign but someone had stolen it.  You could see the drill holes in the front door.  The candy counter was covered by a thin white sheet.

That was just the beginning of my odyssey.

By Ric Royer

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I decided to order a profiterole for dessert. The waiter brought me a copy of Profiterole Digest. The cover showed a gigantic pile of profiteroles photographed in a red wagon. “We have everything in there except for custard, chocolates, and the one that has the hose attached so you can suck out the cream.” He pressed his crotch as he said that last part but I decided to ignore it.

I went with the “Special Occasion Profiterole”. The waiter disappeared. Ten minutes later, another waiter appeared with the pastry. He went away wordlessly.

I stared at the profiterole. They had presented it well– there were little lines of chocolate all along the plate edge and a series of minced strawberries along one side. They had also placed a little off-white card and the words “pastry ball” had been written there in fine calligraphy. There was also an emergency number printed on the back.

I picked up the profiterole and ate half in one bite. It was then that I became aware of an eldritch phantasm from the borders of this world.

I dropped the profiterole. It had turned green and was covered in blood. I could taste the gore in my mouth but could not expel it. Two waiters, watching from behind a ledge and a series of hydrangea bushes, suddenly expired.
“It was a hell beast, unleashed by your indulgence,” said a voice that sounded not unlike a kindly grandfather. I fell over backwards in my chair. Next, I was being dragged by something unseen, deeply into the purlieu. There seemed to be a lot of vomit there.

The next thing I remember is the cargo train. I was packed roughly into a boxcar full of sacks of grains. There was another man there who had had a series of pastries slammed against his face. He nodded slowly.

It was then that I could finally scream.

By Ric Royer

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It was a muddy, debris-choked tributary of a much greater but unseen river.  Several greying, dilapidated highway overpasses blotted out the sun.  The trees along the banks were dead and gangly.  But someone wanted it protected.  They decided I was the man.

I, River Dick.

My interview took place in a forlorn trailer, littered with trash.  The foreman was decidedly obese– his fat rolls could not be contained by his undersized, cheese-stained sweatshirt.  He sat behind an overflowing clothes hamper.  I sat on a stool.  I suspected he lived here.

“You ever do any river dicking before?”

“Nope.”

“You ever done any carnival work?”

“Once”.

“OK.  It’s like that.”

I was hired on the spot and issued a bright yellow pantsuit and a revolver.  The first day passed without incident.

On the second day, some droids attempted to fill their pails under the overpass.  I confronted them.

“You can’t fill those pails here.”

A long series of computational beeps ensued.  One of the droids issued a small, printed-out index card.  It read, “CHEESE OFF, HUMAN.”

I didn’t think twice about it.  I blew them all away and buried them beneath some rocks.

On the third day, the foreman called me in.

“Did you kill some droids?”

“Yep.  You know what– I don’t even feel bad about it.”

“Well, some guys at the lab feel bad about it.  And they’re making me feel pretty damn bad about it too.”

“They egged me on.  They were asking for it,” I added.  “You know it, I know it, they know it.”

“That’s fine,” he said, after a long silence.  “We’ll cover it up.  Just go back along the banks and make sure the parts are pretty well-hidden.”

I did as I was told.  But the parts were gone.  The rest of the day passed without incident.

On the fourth day, the foreman called me in again.  As I was approaching the trailer, I noticed something odd.  There were tracks there, made by rolling droids.  They led off towards the woods.  There was an overhang there, covered by odd brush that didn’t belong.  It was a setup.  I was being sacrificed.

I hotwired the foreman’s pickup and headed for Lankville Beach.

I, River Dick.

By Ric Royer

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It grew dark up there in that room above the forlorn diner.

She had fallen asleep.  There was a little television and I turned it on to nothing but static.  Out of boredom, I started pulling up the carpet with some tongs that I found in a bureau drawer. Came up pretty easily.  I shoved the pieces out a window and onto the roof.

She woke up after a few hours.

“When’s your boy coming home?” I asked.  I was a little worried.  You never know what you’re getting with a mental.

“Who, Dave?”

“Yeah, whatever.”  I feigned disinterest.

“He’s not.  He makes the bread sticks in the morning and then leaves.  We don’t speak.”

“He makes a damn good bread stick.  I’ll give him that.”  I spat cockily on the floor.

“He’s angry with me over this graffiti artist who moved off to the Islands.”

“I get it, baby.  I don’t get angry over that kind of stuff.”  I started to move in again but she got up quickly and lit another cigarette.  I was forced to pretend to be interested in the pillows.  I fluffed them accordingly.

“You should go.  Get a flight back to Lankville.  There’s no hope for anyone here.”

I thought about it.  The Jew wouldn’t be happy.  He wanted those pictures of the cow-eyed girls.  The Jew usually got what he wanted too.  I had an idea.

“Hey, how about posing for some shots for me?  We can frill up the place, you know, class it up.”

“I need to see about the diner.  We had a clumsy patron who kept spilling sauces all over the place.  It’s down there congealing, I can feel it.”

I listened to her walk slowly down the staircase.  For a second, I thought about trashing the room but came to my senses.

Then I placed a collect call to Lankville City.

By Ric Royer

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We touched down in Orion about two in the afternoon.  There was a cabstand but no one wanted to go into town.

“You got the wrong kind of bounty in that place,” said one driver, who leaned against a pole smoking a cigarette.  “Yep.  Bad-tasting cake in Orion.  There’s a carrot there, alright, but be damned if you’ll be able to reach it.”

I stopped the folksy platitudes with a hundred-dollar bill.  He looked at it angrily for a moment, then stuffed it in his breast pocket.  “Let’s go.”

“What about that bad-tasting cake?” I asked.

“For the love of deep hell, you can bet I won’t be staying long.  You can hop out in front of the hotel,” he responded.

We cruised into town.  The main street was all boarded up.  “That cannibal, when he got done with his varied subtractions– well, what you ended up with was a landscape that could not be, in any conceivable manner, ample,” noted the driver.  “It was as if mortal man began slowly removing items from a beautiful fruit basket arrangement until there was nothing…”  I stopped him again.  “Drive me over to that diner,” I said.  “That diner may display the signs of prosperity but you will not find prosperity within.  You will find a mere tomb of sandwiches…”  He trailed off and I ignored it.

The door had a little bell on it.  Nobody was inside and light violin music, piped in through vents in the ceiling, played cheerfully.  I sat down and a pretty fair broad came out of the back.  She was older but sturdy and with some curvy whoppers up front.  I pretended to study the menu.

“We’re about ready to close.  All we have left are some bread sticks that Dave made up this morning.  That and a little bit of old coffee.”

“Who’s Dave?” I said.  I pushed the menu sensuously across the counter and onto the floor.

“He’s my husband.”

“Yeah?  How’s that working out for you?”

“Well…you know, we had a cannibal here.”

I nodded.  “Bring me the bread sticks.  What, are they in a bag or something?  Put ’em in a bag.”

She did as told.  I ate them straight out of the bag, slowly, almost ruthlessly.  The heat picked up.

“You…you have a certain way of eating…”  She trailed off.

“Yeah?  What way is that?”  I consciously let a giant blob of half-eaten bread stick fall out of my mouth onto the counter.

“I don’t know…you can…they have tents…”  She was making no sense now.  It was time– I suddenly crushed my lips into hers.  There was still some bread stick there but we worked it out.

An hour later, we were lying in a room above the diner.

“So, I need to get some pictures of some of the big cow-eyed girls you got here,” I said.

“They’ve all gone.  Everybody’s gone.  Orion is a ghost town.”  She lit a cigarette.

“I thought you had driven the cannibal out into the Depths.”

She laughed.  “They’ll tell you that, sure.”

“It’s not true?”

“Of course not.”

I sat down in a chair and stared out the window.  There was a lone shirtless guy down there, parading around in a plastic King’s crown.  He was making a hell of a racket.

“That’s Substitute Jimmy,” she noted.

“Batshit, huh?’

She paused.  “Maybe.  But maybe we all are.”

“Any more of those bread sticks?”  I was suddenly hungry again.  “In a bag, I mean.”

She looked at me for a long time.

To be continued.

By Ric Royer

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I happened to be hanging around the lunch slots when the Jew wandered up.

“Been tying up some loose ends,” he started.  I stopped him.

“Never good to tie up loose ends.”  I stared straight at him and put some gum in my mouth.  “Don’t wanna’ be standing there with your shorts around your ankles, no cake in hand.”

He seemed confused and that’s how I wanted it.

Turns out he wanted me to fly back to Orion, get some pics of those big cow-eyed girls.  “See if you can take ’em in some barns,” he said.  “What about the crazy cannibal?” I asked, my interest piqued.  “They pick him up?”  “No, as far as I know he’s still out there,” the Jew noted.  “But they’ve driven him out into the Barrens.  It’s said that he hasn’t attacked in over seven months.”

A tray appeared from one of the lunch slots.  There was a heavily-compacted flounder surrounded by little lemons.

“What expenses are we looking at?  Don’t put me up at some guy’s house.  Give me a hotel room.  Have them check the bed springs.”

The Jew thought about that.  Then he sent me down to payroll.

Angie was down there.  I sat on her desk and allowed my pants to clump up around the crotch.

“Where are you going?” she said.  She had some magazine on her lap about yarn.

“Orion.  Could be trouble.  There’s a wild cannibal there.”

She liked trouble.  It was going to be easy from now on.

At dawn, I left Angie in bed and threw a quilt over her– bunch of god damn colored granny squares.  My Aunt had made it.  I hustled out to the airport, slammed down three sodas at the airport bar and boarded the plane.  An entire breakfast cart had been turned over in the aisle– nobody was fooling with it.  I nicked a couple of links that had fallen untouched on a wide napkin. The stewardess looked at me funny but I didn’t care– I was going to Orion.

And that’s how it goes in Orion.

To be continued

By Ric Royer

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For reasons entirely unclear to me, I suddenly purchased a three-bedroom rancher and married an airline stewardess.  She wore way too much makeup and had no interests whatsoever outside of television but I immediately proposed anyway.  I bought her a gigantic diamond ring at her request.

A truck delivered a series of overstuffed grey sofas and recliners and a gaudy bedroom set.  Carpet was installed.  She fretted over that.  When I once dropped a tureen of syrup-soaked pancakes, I was banished to the garage for nearly two days.

I took a job in an office.  There were some binders on shelves and two stand-up file cabinets but I never fooled with them.  There was a little phone and a tape recorder and, for no good reason at all, I set both on fire.  They let me go that evening.

The stewardess was gone then, away on an overnight flight to the Depths.  I came home and sat in one of the grey recliners.  The set, a gigantic wood-enclosed monstrosity with a mysterious blue glow, transmitted forth a series of programs.  I would catch only pieces of them– there was something about some little yellow tickets that were being handed out.  If you got one, you could go to a picnic in a courtyard.  It was all a big to-do.  That one went off and something else came on about giant cardboard boxes filled with electronics.

I went down the hall to the bedroom and opened the closet door.  I looked at the stewardess’ clothes.  Bunch of grey pantsuits.  I had no idea.  I pushed them all to one end of the rod and noticed two round holes in the drywall.  “Two for the road,” I said senselessly.  “Two for the road.”

They were.