The Lankville Daily News

By Ric Royer

File photo

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

File photo

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

File photo

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.